Finches
by The Anonymite
Summary: Draco Malfoy didn't count on Luna showing up to mess it all up.  He could probably get used to her being around, though.  Set during Half-Blood Prince.  Hints of movie-verse.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Harry Potter.

**a/n:** This is... kind of a confusing mix of movie-verse and book-verse, but oh well. I think I'm just way too fond of that birdcage in the sixth movie.

* * *

Draco Malfoy had reached the end of his tether, as evidenced by the fact that he didn't sneer and jeer at Luna Lovegood when he saw her standing at the end of the hallway, staring up into the wrought iron birdcage.

Of course, a lot of this was due to the immense weight caused by the dead finch in his pocket. He was sure that she was looking for the missing bird.

He had never been this tired in his life—as he walked away from the Room of Requirement, studying the blonde's profile, he was fighting the urge to drop to the floor and sleep right there, preferably for several years.

It was unfortunate, really, that she should show up just then. If he were to be honest with himself, which he had developed a bad habit of doing lately, Luna was the last person he wanted to have to face right now. There was something so essentially innocent in her general existence that he could not fathom having to look at her with this burden of guilt and terror pressing on his sanity. It would be like those Muggle confessionals in churches—in that face, there was potential for absolution.

He hated it.

"There used to be two birds in here," she said, that maddeningly soft voice making him cringe, eyes sliding away, fixing on the stone of the floor. "I wonder what happened to the other one."

"Probably died. Birds don't live long," he said flatly, finally reaching the cage and the girl, not looking at either, stepping forward with every intention of breezing past her.

"You spend an awful lot of time in there."

Any other day, he would have glared at her, told her that it was none of her bloody business what he did with his time, maybe called her a blood traitor or abused her father, but she had chosen today, of all days, to pry.

He refused to see it as an abstract attempt at showing compassion, as it probably was meant to be.

Instead, he paused, eyes blown wide and fixed on her face, absorbing the open expression, the interest—he refused, also, to call it concern—that was rather detached, but genuine, showing in the tilt of her head, the way she studied him.

"You're tired, too." She blinked, and something that was almost a frown, but not, worked it's way into the corners of her mouth.

"Must be some mission," she added, throwing Draco so far off-balance that he nearly swore and hexed her and ran for it. How could anyone know? That was impossible.

Absolutely impossible.

He inhaled sharply, expression contorted into something along the lines of horror, making her eyes widen infinitesimally (which should not have been possible, considering how wide they were naturally).

"Oh, I don't know anything about it, don't worry. I just heard Harry talking, and combined with the fact that you haven't been eating and that you've started disappearing between every set of classes instead of lurking with Crabbe and Goyle, I figured that Harry must've got it right, and that you were doing something important."

Draco stuttered incoherently.

Draco _never_ stuttered, not to mention he could feel his ears and neck and face heating with a peculiar mixture of absolute fury at Potter for his insufferable inability to keep his nose out of Draco's business and…embarrassment.

Since when did Loony Lovegood give a dragon's testicle what he did or why he did it?

It took him a few long, long moments to realize that Luna now looked almost horrified herself.

"Harry doesn't know anything, either, and he wasn't talking loudly. People just don't notice me a lot of the time—selective awareness, I think—and I was walking with them onto the grounds, and he was talking about what he thought you were doing. I'm sure he wouldn't have said anything if he'd realized I was there," she said, coming as close to rushing her words as she ever would, watching intently for any sign of lessening tension in his face.

The tension didn't ease so much as warp into incandescent fury, and he leaned forward to glare into her round little face with its round little eyes and its long eyelashes and small mouth and—

"What do _you_ care, Lovegood?"

She blinked at him for a moment, not seeming to notice—or mind—that he was blatantly invading her space, her eyes wandering back up to the birdcage and the one remaining finch.

He didn't think she was going to respond, and was straightening to storm off when she spoke, gaze sliding back to him.

"I'm afraid I don't have an answer to that," she said, her tone of voice insinuating that she had actually given it a great deal of thought in the last several seconds, "but I stole some food from dinner, because you never showed up."

"Wh—_why_?"

"Because Crabbe and Goyle ate with Theodore Nott, and neither of them took any food with them, so I knew you wouldn't get any dinner otherwise." She pulled a bundle of food wrapped in a napkin from the pocket of her robes and held it out to him, looking quite sincere and unashamed of taking such an obvious and involved interest in someone else's well-being.

This was exactly why he had not enjoyed seeing her outside the Room of Requirement.

When he didn't take the food immediately, she smiled her vague smile, continuing hold her offering, and said, "Feel free to tell me to go away. I'm quite used to it"

He really should have done just that. It would have been much more natural than taking the food and pressing his lips together to keep from crying again.

"Thank you," he said as quietly as humanly possible, feeling as guilty as guilty could be, except that when her smile solidified into something quiet and pleased, he felt a little of the burden roll off his shoulders.

"You're welcome. I'll see you," she said, having accomplished her task, her robes brushing his leg as she turned to go.

Halfway down the hallway, she started humming, and he noticed that she wasn't wearing shoes.

He would have to tell Pansy to give the pair she had stolen a few weeks ago back.


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Harry Potter.

**a/n:** So...say "Hi" to my first second chapter eveeerrr! :D ! You guys had better appreciate the effort that went into this kitten, whether or not it's decent-it's all for you guys. As you may or may not be able to tell from the way the chapter ends, this is meant to go on from here, though I have to apologize for the inevitable fact that the third chapter'll take a while. Yaaay, college applications + NaNoWriMo! xD;

* * *

"…bratty little Mudblood, knocking all that ink over in—oi, Draco."

Draco blinked, nearly spilling pumpkin juice down his front.

"What?"

Blaise narrowed his eyes at his pointy, blond, quasi-friend.

"What were you staring at?"

"None of your bloody business, that's what," Draco replied snappishly, flushing and returning his goblet to the table with a bit too much force. Juice sloshed over the edges, splashing onto Goyle's sleeve and plate. "Merlin, no wonder I stopped eating with you sacks, there's no room to think in here."

He left the table, ignoring Nott's grumbling and Crabbe's scowl. Goyle sighed at his plate, obviously upset at having to find a fresh one now. Zabini's eyes bored into Draco's back, a look of pure suspicion fixed on his face.

Meanwhile, the blond in question breezed right out of the castle, traipsing onto the grounds with a gait like a prowling cat. The cold air nipped at his cheeks and hands, making him move faster as he muttered, vague, hateful words aimed at his so-called friends, the school, that old sod Dumbledore, "bloody witch meddling where she isn't wanted…"

In fact, the reason for his little scene—and the pinkness in his cheeks as he left the table—was a certain Ravenclaw. Whom he had got stuck in his head of late. Because of whom he had opted to eat in the Great Hall. Whom he had been staring at across the room, mind gone somewhere into insanity with thoughts of her hair and the smile she had given him when he had accepted her…what was it, a peace offering?

"Food." He scoffed, shaking his head. He nurtured a nasty sneer into place on his face, stuffing his hands as deep into the pockets of his robes as they would go. "Who brings food to a person they hardly know? She's bloody insane. _Loony_, honestly."

Not that he really cared at this point. He tended to be so irritated by everything that a flicker of genuine insanity and bizarreness was almost welcome. There was something nice to such unexpected frankness, the girl's…quaint oddity, the way you could never quite predict it, and yet she managed to be so quiet about it when she did do something truly peculiar.

He sighed, ceasing his stomp towards the lake, frowning at the dead grass at his feet. Merlin, what was wrong with him? Harping on like some lovesick, Confunded arse.

"Bloody ridiculous," he muttered, kicking a rock that lay before his shoe, listening to it skitter through the grass towards the frigid water.

"Bugger all, it's bloody _freezing_ out here. Damn."

* * *

The next day was absolute torture. Blaise wouldn't stop gawping at him, asking probing questions and being generally suspicious, and Crabbe and Goyle were surly and unpleasant. Pansy whined and whined, and classes were absolutely horrific.

They were waiting outside the Transfiguration room, all of the sixth years except Draco cackling about something or other, doing their best to ignore the black mood of their sometimes leader. Draco was more concerned with wondering what was holding McGonagall up, though he was considering thanking whatever or whoever was doing so later. The idle moment was almost welcomed.

Of course, it couldn't just be an idle moment. Of course, nothing could be that simple, because life was on an epic and excruciating quest to make itself as difficult and horrid as possible for him.

Of course, when the door swung open ten minutes late for the start of class, the chastised and shaken student to emerge was a trembling, tear-streaked Luna, clutching a few sheafs of parchment in her hands.

"Ooh, Loony got a T, didn't she?"

"Loony's failing a class!"

"Lookit the ickle Ravenclaw! What happened to all that wit, Loony?"

The Slytherins around him jeered and moved forward, prodding her with words and wand tips as they trickled into the classroom, pulling an unexpectedly harsh glare from the blonde bearing the brunt of their scorn.

"Bugger off," Draco snapped at them, swatting at Nott's head with his textbook, sending a foul glare at the rest of them. He dared not stay back to talk to her, but he had just enough time to shoot her a slightly less mean look than usual. She smiled wanly, and trotted off down the hall to her next class as Draco followed Goyle into McGonagall's domain, wearing a frown of epic proportions, his mood even fouler with confusion.

What on Earth was wrong with him?

* * *

Of course, he had to return to the Room of Requirement, to his ritualistic activity of mentally banging his skull against a brick wall.

Nothing worked on the damn cabinet—no matter what he did, the apples still came back with bits missing. He knew without trying that nothing living would come back in that state. The last thing he needed was another tiny, feathered body to dispose of.

It was with great relief, and great guilt, that he left the Room yet again, having made no progress except to give himself an even larger headache.

He was almost disappointed not to find a waif of a blonde waiting by the birdcage, barefoot and bearing food, but no, no, he had no use of her. She was annoying and insane, and if she knew what was good for her, she would stay as far away from—

"Thank you. For earlier."

Damn. There she was, coming out of an unused classroom down the hall from the cage, looking about as tired as he felt, though quite a bit happier.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he replied, trying to glare at her and failing miserably.

"Outside the Transfiguration classroom? Telling them to shut up?" She paused, peered at him curiously, and seemed to realize he had been being deliberately obtuse in order to save his own skin. "Oh, you were obfuscating, weren't you? Well, I don't know what I'm talking about, either, then."

"Merlin," he sighed, rubbing at his forehead as she smiled one of those vague, dreamy smiles of hers.

Of course, she didn't say anything after that. She just sort of…stared at him, barely blinking, head tilted to one side like some kind of insufferably intuitive dog.

"Well, I mean," he started, the silence having worn on him quickly, "I couldn't very well let them poke at you. You were bloody _crying_."

"I'm sure you don't care if people are crying or not. Popular opinion would have me believe that you're as cold-hearted as they come," she said, tucking her wand behind her ear absently.

"Yeah, well. That's a ridiculous place to keep a wand."

Brilliant riposte, Draco, really brilliant. Oh, he could kick himself.

"Is it? I've always thought it was rather jaunty. I'm glad you ate today."

She had noticed? Wouldn't he have noticed if she had noticed? He'd been staring at her again—the whole time—and she hadn't looked his way once.

"I was hungry. People eat when they're hungry," he said defensively, doing his best not to look at her, living in fear of her frank and forgiving gaze, the little smile lingering in the corners of her mouth.

"By that logic, you'd be asleep right now."

God, how long could she go without blinking?

"Bollocks logic. What does eating have to do with sleeping?"

Ah, there was a blink. She had nice eyelashes.

"If people eat when they're hungry, shouldn't they sleep when they're tired?"

Oh bloody Hell, someone tell him he wasn't thinking about her _eyelashes_.

"I don't follow."

He must be ill, really. This was bloody absurd.

"Your eyes are more tired than Hermione Granger's before exams."

"And you think that means I haven't been sleeping?" He raised an eyebrow, pressing his lips thin.

"It's rather an obvious conclusion, yes," she said simply.

"I really don't know why you care. You're friends with Potter and that Mud—foul Granger girl, what reason do you have to give a rat's arse whether I sleep or not?"

"You think about what you say when you talk to people you don't know very well."

And that was all she said as she breezed off, though he could have sworn she raised her eyebrows at him in an almost insinuative manner just before she turned.

Bloody Hell, he was going mad. Absolutely, stark raving mad.

* * *

"Pansy, give Lovegood her shoes back," he said when he got back to the Common Room, rubbing at his forehead and collapsing into an armchair.

"What! Draco? Are you ill?" She looked horrified and confused, though those emotions were tangled up in her grotesque attempt to look concerned for his well-being.

"Only of petty theft. She's harmless, and honestly, it's depressing seeing a sappy Ravenclaw barefoot in the middle of January," he said, making his voice sound as flippant as possible. If she thought he actually gave a damn about Lovegood, he would never hear the end of it.

Pansy scoffed, folding her arms across her chest huffily.

"Honestly, you'd think the freak would have more than two pairs of shoes," she said with a pout. "And they're both such ugly things, too. Why should I give them back?"

"Because," Draco said, leaning forward quite abruptly, a dark scowl on his face, "I said to. Just…leave them somewhere she'll find them."

"But Drac—!"

"Shut it, witch. I don't care. Go now, or I'll hex you," he said, reclining back into his chair tiredly, returning to rubbing at his forehead. He seriously considered going to the Hospital Wing and asking Madame Pomfrey for a headache potion, but as Pansy stomped past him towards the girls' dormitory, he decided he was too exhausted to deal with stuffy staff.

He stayed in his chair until Pansy stormed back past him, a pair of torn and distinctly un-Pansy-ish trainers in her hands. Satisfied that she was doing as bidden, he dragged himself up the stairs to the sixth year dorm, taking great pleasure in finding it empty.

Considering that the next day was Friday, and he only had the one class on Fridays, Draco was displeased to find himself in the Room of Requirement at nine in the morning, his stomach complaining about its lack of food, his mind complaining about this dragon-piss situation he had gotten himself into.

It was an honor, of course, to have the Dark Lord trust him with something so monumental as the infiltration of Hogwarts, but if he were to be honest with himself—which, again, he had developed an uncomfortable habit of doing recently—it was endlessly more torturous a situation than any reward could warrant. If he mucked it up, he ran a serious risk of incurring the Dark Lord's fury, which would surely end in his demise, or at least several hours of suffering at the hands of the Cruciatus Curse and Aunt Bella's insane cackle. If he succeeded, he would have to…well, kill Dumbledore. Which had not been successful yet. As far as he knew, the poisoned firewhiskey was still sitting in Slughorn's liquor cabinet, and then there was the fiasco with the cursed necklace just before Christmas.

Obviously, killing the old bastard was proving just as difficult, if not more so, than fixing the cabinet, and here Draco was, sitting on the floor of the Room of Requirement, his pounding head in his hands.

"Merlin," he muttered, squeezing his eyes shut against the waves of terror crashing against his consciousness. How had he gotten himself into this? Why couldn't he get himself _out_ of it?

"Because your father's a bloody imbecile," he said, answering his own question with a growl, hitting the floor with his fists as angry, violent tears streamed from his eyes. "You have to do it for mother."

Not that rationalizing gave him any peace. Still, it gave him the determination to haul himself to his feet, to pick his wand off of the floor, to return to his mutterings of spells and prayers.

"_Harmonia Nectere Passus! Harmonia Nectere Passus! Harmonia Nectere Passus—"_

_

* * *

_

It was noon when he stumbled out of the Room of Requirement, feeling bruised all over, though his pain was only in his head. All he wanted was food and his four-poster, but with the threat of History of Magic looming over his head like an ominous thunderhead, his motivation to walk down five flights of stairs to the Great Hall to eat among his exuberant, idiotic peers waned. Instead, he sat himself against a wall, staring at the ceiling blearily. His stomach growled, but he ignored it.

Ten minutes later, his stupor was disturbed by humming and the shuffle of feet.

Half of him wanted to shout at whoever was approaching to bugger off, but he quickly concluded that he was too lethargic to do anything that active about the situation. Resultantly, he sat in wait of what was sounding more and more like a certain dotty blonde.

Luna had just lapsed into lyrics when she rounded the corner, singing "So please turn on your magic beam, Mister Sandman, bring me a dream" just in time to lay eyes on a seriously ruffled and irritated Draco.

"You look like you've run afoul of a Wrackspurt. I wish I could help, but I'm going to be late for Care of Magical Creatures," she said airily, stopping a few feet away from him.

He glared at her.

"What do you want?"

She was unfazed by his bluntness, as per usual.

"You missed breakfast and lunch," she said, pulling another napkin-wrapped food bundle from her pocket. She took a few steps forward, holding the food out to him with yet another transient smile.

"Merlin, I can't fathom why you care so much," he muttered, taking the food despite the venom in his words. He wasn't about to turn down a meal free of obnoxious Dining Hall environment.

"I can't say I'm quite sure, either. Maybe I just feel sorry that you made such foul friends."

He paused in his hasty unwrapping of the little bundle of food to peer up at her, his face contorted into a combination of disdain and confusion.

"Everyone in this bloody school is foul," he said, a sneer in his words.

She merely 'hmm'ed in response, nodding as though she had just been enlightened, and turned to go.

"What, did I enlighten you to my misanthropic attitude? It's hardly a secret," he said through a mouthful of turkey, a cynical eyebrow lifted.

"Not really, no. I was just thinking that it's no wonder you let the world step all over you."

And she left, leaving only the food in his lap and the sight of shoes guarding her toes against the harsh coldness of the stone floor for comfort.


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Harry Potter.

**a/n:** Just so you don't think I'm insane or unaware of, like, the major differences between Muggle culture and Wizarding culture, yes, I am postulating that wizards have narcotics, too. Think about it—with all of those wiggy, mind-addling curses floating around, there have to have been people who have used them recreationally, and anyway, pot and mushrooms grow in wizard-y places, too. I hope you like the chapter. I'm pretty proud of this one~

* * *

It was Saturday afternoon, the light already dimming in the castle, and Draco was feeling entirely too agitated as he stared up the stairs at a very bothersome blonde.

He had only been walking. There had been no intention whatsoever of searching her out. He was entirely innocent, and yet, there he was, watching her, eyebrows drawn together.

_Bollocks_, he thought, hands fisting. Honestly, he ought to have just stayed in the common room. Things would have been much easier.

* * *

_Earlier_

* * *

It was unprecedented, he supposed, that he felt so guilty for dallying with Pansy. Honestly, he was a sixteen-year-old boy—what was life without snogging occasionally?

Still, even as he tugged the black-haired Slytherin into an abandoned classroom, there was a knot of unease dwelling where the excitement ought to be. He refused to acknowledge that it was the result of Luna's cryptic, vaguely judgmental comment from the day before, no matter how solidly manifested the guilt and confusion flowering in his gut was. Who was she to judge him, anyway? He had no reason to feel bad, or shifty, or guilty, or any of it, honestly. She was just a bratty blood traitor, and he needed a distraction.

He pressed Pansy against the wall, mouth coming down roughly on hers. He did his best to ignore her giggling and keening, hands slipping into her robes with an ease that bespoke years of practice, but it just felt _wrong_. Something about the way she sounded when she started breathing heavily, the way her skin was generically soft, the way she pawed at his shoulders, his chest, the way she mussed his hair in her frantic search for something to hold onto just revolted him. Which was new.

It wasn't that he had ever particularly enjoyed the girl's company—she was insipid, and far below him in intellect and social graces—but she had always been good fodder for releasing pent up frustration. Of course, he'd always been sure that there were better girls to be had running around this failure of a school, but it was so much easier to dally with those closest to him. It meant less socializing, less conversation with people, considering that he could just tell her to shut up, and she would often listen.

Now, all he could feel was disgust, and as he hesitated, the taste of her in his mouth nearly sent him over the edge, nearly made him lose it and flee the room, the castle, the grounds, because _everything_, not just this, was going wrong.

Let it not be said, though, that he didn't try to cut loose, to go through with what he had started in spite of his abrupt and jarring bout of Pansy Parkinson-induced nausea. Moment of hesitance bypassed, his fingers crawled upwards, finding her breasts as he kissed her into breathlessness, but then she sighed his name, her head rolling back, and he lost all his will to keep going.

Draco shoved her away, dragging the back of his hand across his mouth.

"Draco! What-" She looked alarmed at the sudden loss of contact, eyes blown wide, her cheeks flushed.

He paused just long enough to straighten his robes and hair, carding a hand impatiently through the flaxen mess that now insisted on hanging in his eyes. Predictably, Pansy reached for him, lips parted, wordlessly begging him not to push her away as he had already done to everyone else.

He evaded her grasp, stepping further away just as her fingers started to close on his arm.

"Forget it," he grunted at her, not even sparing her a glance as he swept from the room, a scowl fixed firmly on his face.

He missed the way she sagged as he left, her expression sinking into misery and suspicion.

Disastrous did not even begin to describe that encounter.

Of course, the day only got worse.

* * *

"_I was just thinking that it's no wonder you let the world step all over you,"_ Luna said, yet again, in his head, making his scowl deepen.

What could she have possibly meant by that? He was a Malfoy—nobody stepped on Malfoys. It wasn't like he laid down like a bloody doormat. That would be positively absurd, and nigh on impossible, honestly. He'd bloody _murder_ anyone who tried to treat him with anything less than his due, and everyone knew that. _Everyone._

"She's bloody mad," he muttered, turning a corner, only to find himself staring down the corridor at the tapestry he so loathed. He felt abruptly that he ought to have paid more attention to where he was walking.

"And so am I," he added, palming his face. "Stark raving mad."

Still, it encouraged him that there wasn't a loony blonde in sight, nor could he hear any student-born insipid chatter.

Sighing, he sank to the floor at the opposite end of the corridor from the tapestry, leaning his head back against the wall. The bird cage hung to his left, the one remaining finch twittering at him.

He looked up, watching the small, black and yellow bird as it resettled its wings with a flick. His mind calmed for a moment, occupied with how it really was quite a pretty bird, graceful in its quick, halting movements. Its fellow had been an elegant creature, too, but of course, he had killed it.

It fixed one small, black eye on him, head tilting to and fro. His thoughts started to roil again as he watched it, turning from a focused concern and confusion at Luna's vague comment to a general, ambient feeling of terror. His horrible situation leaked into his head again, filling his blood stream with fear-related adrenaline, eyes longing to turn towards the Room of Requirement, if only to prove to himself that it was still there. That there was still hope, that he still had time to do what he needed to do, that it wasn't over yet.

He kept his gaze on the finch, though, making himself listen to its chirping, making himself watch as it hopped from rung to run in its large, bronze cage. It looked at him again, and tilted its head, and then he wasn't seeing the bird anymore. In his mind's eye, Luna was tilting her head at him, eyes twinkling with the same kind of bird-bright knowledge as the finch. Her words rang in his head again, making him swear and throw his head back against the stone of the wall, pain shooting through his skull.

He blinked sightlessly at the wall across from him, feeling exhaustion creep in.

What was happening to him? He couldn't even focus on his mission anymore, what with the idiotic Ravenclaw popping into his head every five minutes, and he was just so bloody _tired_. Something was wrong with him.

Obviously, he was cracking up. Obviously.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, he was crossing the castle to the library, hoping to find some quiet in a corner of Madame Pince's domain. His head hurt, and not just from hitting it. The world was just so bloody convoluted, and here he was, stuck at bloody Hogwarts when he ought to be running for his life, or at least running to the Hospital Wing to have his sanity questioned by a professional.

Consequently, he had become very nearly the archetype of mope when he glanced up to find the one person he absolutely did not want to encounter standing halfway up the stairs he had been about to climb.

Luna was distracted, or so it seemed, choosing to stare at a painting rather than be aware of her surroundings. Draco couldn't decide if he was glad that she hadn't noticed him or not. On the one hand, in her abstraction, he could probably slip away without her saying anything cryptic and bothersome, because honestly, he had had quite enough vagueness from her to be going on with. On the other hand, asking her what in the world she had meant with that remark yesterday would be a good idea.

He surprised himself by choosing to climb up to her, glaring the whole way. She had caused him strife, and he was going to sort it out, no matter how uncomfortable the prospect of looking her in the eye still made him.

"Lovegood," he said flatly, standing a few steps below her. At this level, they were about the same height, and as she turned to look at him, her eyes met his much more frankly than they had as of yet. He mused that it probably had something to do with the fact that she wasn't looking up, and that she looked dottier when she looked up.

Predictably, she interrupted his train of thought with something peculiar, tilting her head to one side as she said:

"Oh, hello, Draco. I was just thinking about how odd blinking is."

Draco fell silent, staring at her as though she was more deserving of the nickname "Loony" than he would have imagined possible.

"Yes, well, you would, wouldn't you," he said eventually, scowling and breaking away from those bloody eyes, looking up the stairs.

"You don't have to be nervous about asking things," she replied after a moment, eyes still fixed quite solidly on his face. For all that she was thinking about blinking, she certainly didn't do it very much herself.

That brought his eyes flashing back to her, one pale eyebrow arching.

"I'm not _nervous_, you—"

She cut him off.

"You were looking very serious when I saw you earlier—"

"When did you see me earlier?"

"—and you still look serious," she said, ignoring his irate interruption. "Combined with the fact that you instigated conversation this time, I'm assuming that something I've said has been bothering you, and you've come to confront me about it, but you're nervous because I might have seen something about you that even you haven't seen."

He stared at her dumbly, his mouth hanging open with words unsaid.

She tilted her head at him, continuing to not blink as she stared quite disconcertingly.

The silence dragged, Draco stuttering internally, and doing his best to keep that stuttering out of the auditory realm. After all, stuttering was undignified and idiotic-sounding.

"You should wear your hair like that more often," she said after the longest thirty seconds of his life, though he really couldn't decide if the silence was better than that completely ridiculous suggestion.

Luna Lovegood? Give him fashion advice? Merlin, what was the world coming to?

"Look," he said, eyes narrowing as he climbed a step up and jabbed a finger into her sternum in an accusatory manner. "You have done nothing but drag me around in these incomprehensible circles since you decided to—to what, pity me? I'm tired of it. You're bloody insane, and I don't need your bollocks antithetical logic right now, or ever. My life is complicated enough without you passing inconceivable judgments on my character, and making me feel bloody guilty for working to save my family's dignity, because my father's too much of a—"

He cut himself off, his cheeks heating as he realized what he had nearly admitted out loud. Showing shame for his father was showing weakness, and hell if he was going to do that in front of this vile little…

"I'm not going to tell anyone that you're ashamed of your father, Draco," she said, effectively derailing his train of thought. Her eyes had gone wider with his increased proximity, and it looked like the finger he still had thrust into her chest was causing some not exactly small amount of pain. "I don't tell Harry everything I hear, you know. I'm not his spy, and even if I were, I wouldn't tell him anything about you."

Draco blinked incredulously, too stunned to take a step back as he ordinarily would. There was barely a foot of space between them, but he was too busy wondering how she came by this level of insanity without years of violent narcotics abuse.

"Why?" was all he could manage, given over to slack-jawed disbelief as he was, because this wasn't honestly happening, was it? She was trying to…get him to…what, confide in her? Honestly?

"Because you're a person, too, and you're obviously not confiding in your friends. Everyone needs an outlet, and I do have rather a lot of discretion when I want to do," was her reply. The honesty in her expression made his skin crawl.

"Merlin, you're infuriating. No wonder everyone hates you."

"I don't really think it has anything to do with being infuriating, actually. I'm fairly certain everyone hates me because I'm odd, and because my father is a public conspiracy theorist who has a tendency to accuse the Ministry of things they consider to be false."

He sighed, choosing to disregard that supposition as he ran a hand over his face in aggravation.

"Just…what did you mean when you said that I let the world step on me?" He looked up, meeting her gaze with his exhaustion plain on his face.

She blinked, finally, and sighed, eyes breaking away from his momentarily before flickering back, an odd kind of solemnity in them.

"You're scared," she said, a great amount of her usual dottiness gone as she peered at him. "But instead of running away or looking for a way to get out of the situation that has you petrified, you're just accepting your fear and letting the people who've commanded you win, despite the fact that you have every right and power to tell them to find someone else to do their dirty work."

He opened his mouth to interrupt, but she held a hand up to stop him.

"You don't have the kind of duty to your family that you think you do. No one is responsible for anyone else's actions, and yet you seem to be covering for your father, and feeling guilty about the whole thing. If you chose to back out, I'm sure the blame would be fleeting."

"You don't understand," he said darkly, no longer looking at her. He took a step around her, intending to leave her where she was so she could keep thinking idiotic, quixotic things and not bother him.

She reached out a hand to stop him, fingers closing gently on the same arm for which Pansy had reached only an hour before. His eyes darted down, examining the pale, delicate hand holding him in place.

When he looked up at her face, she was smiling in a distinctly sad way.

"I know I don't," she said, "But I grasp the general concept, and I have a feeling I can guess at the intent, and the people behind it."

She paused, and her fingers tightened on his arm slightly, squeezing in a way that he guessed was meant to be reassuring.

"You're not alone, Draco."


	4. Chapter 4

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Harry Potter.

**a/n:** So, I have several things to say for this one. Numero Uno: I apologize if it's crappy-I hurried, because I feel bad for updating so inconsistently. Numero Dos: I'm kind of worried that Draco got a bit out of character in this one, but if you read Numero Uno, you can extrapolate that I don't want to spend too much time editing obsessively because HOMG guilt. Numero Tres: IT'S CHRISTMAS EVE YOU GUYS I CAN'T

* * *

He stared at her blankly for a few moments, feeling the warmth of her hand on his arm quite acutely. The sincerity he could see in her face made his gut knot up in some odd mixture of fear and…anticipation, and though she had answered the question he had come here to ask, he found his confusion deepening.

Draco's cheeks and ears flushed red, and the feeling of heat in his face made his ever-present ire rise to the surface with a bubble and a snarl.

"Of course I'm alone," he spat, pulling his arm out of her grasp with a vitriolic flash of his eyes. "When you've been enlisted by the Dark Lord, you're always alone, no matter how hard you or anyone else try."

Luna's eyes widened, her hand dropping to her side as she stared at him, face gone pale. She had guessed as much, certainly—in such a time, it was fairly predictable that a Slytherin with such a family legacy as Draco had would join You-Know-Who—but to have him admit it aloud? He may as well have just confessed to giving Katie Bell that cursed necklace, or putting her under the Imperius Curse.

"That's what I thought," he said darkly after waiting far longer than she deserved for her to say something. "Your idiotic dogma of optimism and compassion is useless here, so just give up, Lovegood. You can't help me."

He climbed the staircase, and was about to turn the corner when she spoke, her voice just loud enough to be heard over his footsteps and the pounding of his heart.

"No, I can't," she said, all traces of dreaminess gone from her voice, "But I can try."

And try she did, much though she had other things to worry about.

* * *

The very next day, when he left the Room of Requirement, the first thing he heard—aside from the Sunday morning quietness of the castle—was the crisp crunch of an apple being bitten into.

He prepared to storm past her, ignoring her pleading eyes and sympathetic intentions but, as per usual, she acted before he could do any such thing. There were no pleading eyes, though, and her sympathetic intentions were quite well-masked as she barely glanced at him, preferring to keep her eyes glued to the copy of _Intermediate Transfiguration_ as she held up an unbitten apple quite like the one in her other hand.

Draco fully intended to ignore the offering, but, unfortunately, his stomach leapt at the prospect of sustenance and chose that moment to release a deafening gurgle.

Flushing, he edged towards Luna, coming only near enough to grab the spectacular globe of fruit. He then retreated several feet, turning it over in his hands and glancing at the blonde sitting so innocuously on the floor. It wasn't like her to be so silent. Maybe he had gotten to her after all?

Her quietness, though….It was uncomfortable. Decidedly so.

Holding in a sigh, he took a bite of his apple and sat a bit away from her.

"I never know where they get apples this time of year," he said lamely, attempting for some odd reason to make conversation.

She didn't even blink.

"They're grown in cellars by ill-treated House Elves and slews of incarcerated Muggle botanists, all under the control of Ministry wizards conspiring to earn more pocket money," she said frankly, following her words with another crisp crunch into her own apple.

Draco snorted, leaning his head back against the wall. She seemed almost…tetchy in her curtness, which was definitely new.

"Did your father teach you that? It's a load of bollocks," he said, the mocking sounding a little strained even to him.

"My father is quite intelligent," she riposted quickly, eyes squeezing shut tightly as her shoulders tensed, confirming his suspicion that yes, she was rather testy today. How odd. "I don't know why everyone feels the need to assail his vast intellect simply because he has a fondness for rooting out things people would rather not talk about. It's not his fault that he's paranoid!"

He stared at her, eyes wide, all thoughts of the Vanishing Cabinet gone from his mind. Luna Lovegood had just _snapped_ at him.

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said after a moment, voice quieter. Her head fell back against the wall, and she sighed. "I suppose I'm a bit on edge. I didn't mean to take it out on you."

Her words were greeted with further silence from the Slytherin sitting a few steps away, as he was a bit occupied trying to figure out what one does with A) an ill-tempered Lovegood, B) an ill-tempered girl that isn't Pansy, and C) an entirely foreign desire to lend comfort to said ill-tempered person.

He supposed that waiting for her to…talk about it would be a decent option, but she didn't seem too keen on talking of her own volition, and anyway, why did he care?

_Well, obviously because it's interesting to see her so bothered_, some inner voice said, and he was about to agree when a less sadistic voice added, _And she looks upset_. Which raised the question of why he cared if she looked upset, which he gave up on very quickly, not wanting to dig too deep into something as obviously not good as that.

"I don't care who you take it out on," he started, sounding almost as awkward as he felt, "I mean, I don't really care at all, but—all right, what's wrong?"

And then she looked at him for the first time in a whole five minutes, something resembling discomfort living in the slight downward curl of her lips, the crease forming between her pale eyebrows.

"You're going to laugh," she said, and for a moment it sounded as though she cared what he thought, which couldn't possibly be true. Then again, he _was_ a Malfoy—_everyone_ cared what he thought.

"I'm not sure if I know how to laugh anymore," he replied with a strong hint of dark humor, some echo of his old signature smirk twisting his lips.

She didn't respond to the bitterness with more than an indistinct, cursory smile. Looking down at the book in her lap, she sighed again, and then said, "I'm failing Transfiguration," with a heavy tone of voice, as though failing a class was the worst possible thing that could happen to a person.

"Oh God, your Ravenclaw is showing," he said, biting back the laughter that he had sort of promised not to give voice to.

"I told you you'd laugh."

"I'm not laughing!"

"Not out loud, but your eyes don't look tired anymore, and you're holding your shoulders more like you did last year. You were always laughing at someone back then," she said, peering at him with an expression that was probably her version of glumness, vague as it was.

"Fine," he scoffed, rolling his eyes despite the truth in her words. He did feel a bit lighter, which made it easy to arch an eyebrow at her and ask, "Aren't you supposed to be the intellectual cream of the crop? Whoever heard of a Ravenclaw failing a class!"

Far from snapping at him as most students would do, Luna's eyes quite abruptly misted over, and she hung her head, long blonde hair hiding her face as she sniffled loudly.

_Great going, Draco_, he said to himself, feeling truly horrified. He hadn't made a girl cry that wasn't Pansy in months, and it wasn't even deliberate this time! No wonder he was having no luck with the Vanishing Cabinet—obviously he lacked common sense on an alarming scale.

"Oh, Merlin, don't do that," he hissed, running a hand through his hair as he watched her shoulders shake. He heard her take a shuddering breath, struggling through hiccoughs to gather enough solidarity to speak.

"That's exactly it," she said, sounding truly miserable. "Whoever heard of a Ravenclaw failing class? It's ridiculous, and I've done everything I can think of." She hiccoughed several times, her hands disappearing behind the curtain of her hair, presumably to wipe her face. She tucked most of the curls back behind her ear, uncovering tear-stained cheeks and red-rimmed eyes that looked all the bluer for her brief bout of weeping. "I've read the book four times, and my water goblet still has tail feathers."

Were Draco a wittier or kinder man, he would attempt to console her with a comment along the lines of "Well, that gives the goblet character, doesn't it?" Unfortunately, he tended to be a bit of a bastard, and consequently knew little of the worlds of comforting humor and compassion. He found himself wishing he had learned about those worlds, though, as he looked at her sitting so disconsolately in a drafty corridor, with a book she obviously felt no love for, and only him to talk to.

It took him a moment, but he found a set of semi-sensitive, though mostly ingrained words to give her.

"I'm sorry," he said, the phrase attempting to edge upwards and make itself a question. He stopped the reflex, though, and it just came out slightly gruffer than he had intended.

She shook her head, glancing at him marginally as she said, "It's not your fault. I don't really think it's my fault either, though. Sometimes people just aren't good at things."

Draco snorted, turning his gaze to the apple in his hand, the bit of white flesh showing beneath its skin already gone brown from the air.

"Tell me about it," he said, turning the fruit a few times between his thumb and middle finger before snapping another bite out of it. He chewed broodingly, eyes on the floor.

"I suppose you're under a bit more pressure to be good at things than I am, though," Luna murmured, her voice coming from much closer than before.

He jumped, glancing to his right to find that she had scooted towards him, narrowing the gap between them to a mere foot of space. He noticed that she had left her textbook, and had her attention focused on her half-eaten apple, knees curled to her chest.

"That's an understatement," he said after he recovered from his proximity-induced shock, his moroseness slightly undermined by the faint tone of distraction in his voice. She really did have quite nice bone structure—he had never noticed before.

Luna remained silent, eating her apple thoughtfully. She looked to have cheered up a bit, though she still lacked a certain bit of her characteristic flightiness.

He distracted himself from his distracting—and very not good—thoughts by likewise munching on his apple, throwing her occasional glances.

After a good three minutes of ruminating, he shifted, stretching his legs in front of him.

"Why do you care about Transfiguration, anyway? I mean, aside from the whole…intelligence stigma imposed by your House. It's a rubbish subject, honestly. Who needs to know how to turn toucans into water goblets?"

"Well, Daddy and I have been getting a bit ahead of ourselves lately," she said, tilting her head slightly as she fiddled with the stem of her apple, "and we've started looking at internships for after I graduate, and all of the ones I'm considering require a N.E.W.T. in Advanced Transfiguration. At the rate I'm going, I'm not even going to qualify for the O.W.L. course."

Draco pondered it for a moment, watching as she twisted the stem around and around, blinking when it snapped away.

Eventually, he turned to examine her profile, and said quite directly, "I'm sure you could find someone to help you. You know…Granger or someone. Bet she'd tutor you until you cried."

He snickered at the thought, and then stopped himself when he realized that Luna was looking at him, an odd expression on her face.

"She already has, actually. It was quite embarrassing," she said, and the way her breath puffed out, it almost sounded like she was laughing. She stopped though, leaning her head back against the wall to gaze at the ceiling. "Furthermore, she didn't help at all. Hermione tends to approach teaching with the sensitivity of a brick wall. A very easily aggravated brick wall."

"Well," he said, biting back more laughter at the image Luna had just spun, "I suppose…"

And then he did something that he would curse himself for doing for the rest of the week.

"I suppose I could help you," he said, and then paled in horror at the realization that he had just offered someone help voluntarily, despite the already overwhelming mess he was in with trying to manage classes, schoolwork, and fixing the Vanishing Cabinet, not to mention the fact that he had just set himself up for being seen with Luna in public, which would really only lead to more pain, and honestly, _why was he persisting in caring_?

Luna looked surprised, and more than a bit bemused as she studied his increasingly mortified expression.

"I'm only hypothesizing," she started, eyebrows lifted at him, "but judging by the fact that you just called it a rubbish subject, I'm not sure that your help would be beneficial."

"Also," she added when he didn't reply immediately, "I'm gathering that you're coming to regret offering your services. You look rather pale."

"I got an E on my Transfiguration O.W.L.," he muttered after a bit, attempting to protect his sorely damaged dignity belatedly. "You should be thanking me on bent knee."

She considered this.

"I'm going to assume that was an attempt to restore your sense of loftiness and not dignify it with a proper response, considering that kneeling in this situation would make me taller than you, which would only damage the airs you're attempting to affect."

"Oh shut up," he growled, avoiding looking at her as he attempted to figure out why exactly he had done that, and if it had any notable merit.

On the one hand, he did, technically, owe her for feeding him. On the other hand, he had never really given a damn when he owed people favors, and anyway, she twisted him around in so many ridiculous circles whenever she attempted to help him, it was all really more of a hindrance than anything.

But she looked so _pathetic_!

"Okay, okay," he said, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes, "I'll help you, but only on the condition that you don't talk to me in public."

"I can't say that I imagine you'll be a very good teacher," she mused aloud, "but the sentiment is appreciated, and I'm not going to turn down readily offered help."

She paused.

"Thank you, Draco."

He grunted noncommittally in response, trying to pretend that he wasn't turning into some pitiful mess of…love for his fellow wizard, or something equally ridiculous. Honestly, Draco Malfoy, lending his help to eccentric damsels in distress? The world really was going to shit.

"Oh," Luna said abruptly, interrupting his thoughts. "I suppose I'll be expected to continue to remind you to take care of yourself as an unspoken part of the agreement, yes?"

"It's hardly unspoken if you bloody talk about it," he replied, moving his hands to shoot her a glare.

"All right. I'll leave it up to you to find a time and place," she said, standing as she spoke. "In the meantime, I'll bother you if you don't show up at dinner, though I don't suppose I'll do it in person. That would violate your half of the bargain. I'm sure I can convince Peeves to pelt ink pots at you, or something of the sort."

And with that, she was gone, and him frowning after her as she picked up her textbook and padded off around the corner, humming "Odo the Hero."

_At least she was smiling again_, his suddenly traitorous brain said, making him groan and knock his head against the wall rather harder than he had meant to do.


	5. Chapter 5

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Harry Potter. I totally pulled that wandwork nonsense out of my ass, though, so I guess I sort of own that. In a totally derivative way.

**a/n:** I am so tired of writing about the goddamned Vanishing Cabinet, oh my God. Can I just skip all this logical fiddle faddling and angstmuffin!Draco mess and make him date the Hell out of Luna? That would be so much more enjoyable. Also oh my God, you guys, this chapter is laaate. And crappyyy. And I've started doodling the end of this fic, and bee tee dubs, it gets sadfaaace. I don't know what to do!

* * *

Draco slept less that night than he had in a week. He felt absolutely wretched as he entered the Great Hall for breakfast, a pounding headache having taken up residence in its usual place in his skull, along with the heavy, dry feeling in his sleep-deprived eyes.

He had spent hours lying in bed mulling over possible motives for doing what he had done yesterday afternoon—namely being overwhelmingly nice to Loony Lovegood—and had come up with a grand total of zero options that he found comforting. There had been a brief moment of relief when he had realized that he could just say he was tutoring her so he could make fun of her for failing a class, but his triumph was squashed when that bothersome voice he had come to know as his ill-used, oft-ignored, but highly present conscience pointed out that he had made no effort whatsoever to make fun of her yesterday, and that he would be lying to himself if he pretended to try now.

And thus, he had fought with himself, twisted in the sheets of his four-poster as he tried obstinately to relearn how to lie to himself, coming up empty-handed every time he tried to believe that Luna was just some idiotic, airheaded blood traitor who deserved what she had coming. Instead of helping, his thrice-cursed conscience waxed poetic on her genuine kindness, and how it ought to be repaid, and yes, the innocence she showed on such a regular basis was alarming and obnoxious, but it was also uncommon, and a bit endearing.

He had groaned at that, playing the word "endearing" over and over in his head, mortified that his own disloyal brain had dredged up such sentiments. If he didn't know any better, he would think he was falling for her, but that would be ridiculous. Who would fall for Lovegood?

Draco snorted into his porridge, shaking his head tiredly as he entertained a sudden and amusing image of Potter, ever the dunderheaded champion of the weak, professing his undying love to Luna, and her replying by jabbering about a Nimble-Toed Mumblewingfried and its peculiar mating habits, or some such nonsense. He'd believe it from her, but he doubted that even Potter would stoop to such levels of inanity.

His thoughts whirling, he looked up from his plate to reach for the pumpkin juice, only to catch sight of a certain blonde, who smiled airily at him as she breezed past the Slytherin table, her bag slung over her shoulder.

Face deliberately blank, he refilled his goblet, doing his best to cut off any and all thought tending in the direction of Lovegood. He had better things to worry about, like satisfying the Dark Lord's—

"Did Loony Lovegood just smile at you?"

Draco jumped, turning to give Blaise a glare. The other boy had a bit of a knack for sneaking up on people and seeing things that nobody wanted seen, and his accusations and probing questions were the last thing Draco wanted to deal with right now.

"She's insane, Blaise, she was probably just wandering off to chase one of her ridiculous creatures, or play with thestrals or something," he replied sniffily, sipping at his pumpkin juice and hoping that Zabini would drop it.

"That's not what it looked like to me," Blaise said, looking quite suspicious, as he was wont to do.

"Well, you're an idiot," Draco riposted, shooting another glare at him. "Honestly, are you trying to accuse me of talking to her or something? Did you miss the part where I think she's a halfwit?"

The other boy looked unconvinced, but dropped his line of questioning with a shrug. When Draco looked back to his food, though, Blaise glanced at Pansy significantly. She looked grim in return, darting her eyes towards the blond currently occupied with his porridge before sighing and frowning darkly, gaze dropping to her bacon.

* * *

He didn't have a chance to give thought to actually, physically tutoring Luna until Tuesday, though admittedly it wasn't a "chance" so much as a good twenty minute span of History of Magic that he honestly didn't care about.

It took him a good five of the twenty minutes to once again get over the awkwardness of the situation. Even thinking about spending time helping her with her bloody Transfiguration homework was giving him the twitches, considering what would happen if anyone found them in the act. He would never hear the end of it.

Still, he wasn't one to back out on something he hadn't been joking about, or at least he wasn't anymore, so when he had finished having another private anxiety attack, he got down to considering places to secretly tutor the school oddity.

There was, of course, the Room of Requirement, but he did spend rather enough time in there as it was, and he was loathe to add another item to his short, but troublesome, list of reasons to pay the room a visit. Unused classrooms were always an option, especially ones in obscure corners of the school, but those carried the danger of being discovered by couples seeking privacy. He supposed the doors could be locked, so it wasn't completely out of the question, but the thought of locking himself in with Luna made him itchy for some reason.

Then there was the Forest, which, through benefit of being out-of-bounds to students, would be quite a private place to do business, but Draco had never looked for a reason to go in there, and was not about to start doing so now. He'd had full enough of that bloody Forest in first year.

He continued to flicker from one option to the next, switching frowns accordingly, until he came to the conclusion that really, the only viable option was an empty classroom. He knew a good locking spell to keep busybodies out, and if Lovegood knew what was good for her, she would be discrete and no one would have cause to wonder.

When he and his classmates left Professor Binns' musty classroom, Draco pulled a folded bit of paper from his pocket and, after glancing about to make sure he wasn't being observed, touched it gently with his wand and muttered. The paper contorted quickly, corners folding into a small paper airplane before it whooshed off to find the Ravenclaw to whom it was addressed.

Unfortunately, his day took a dive for the worse when he forced himself to skip lunch and trudge up to the third floor, passing the tapestry three times and entering to spend another forty minutes muttering fruitlessly at a cabinet that was, at this point, the only hope of survival for both him and his parents. His continuing failure was intolerable, though he could do nothing to better the situation. It wasn't like he was deliberately not fixing the Cabinet, and it wasn't at all his fault that both of his attempts on Dumbledore's life had gone awry. Obviously, Katie Bell was an idiot, even when Imperiused, and Slughorn was a bloody glutton. Draco looked forward to the day when he would drop dead from that bottle he was hoarding.

* * *

Thursday evening found Draco retreating rather earlier than usual from the Room of Requirement, his hands buried in the pockets of his robes as he trekked up two floors and through several hidden passages, almost getting stuck in one of the disappearing steps on the corner stair between the fourth and fifth floors. Merlin, but was he tired.

Pausing in front of a particular room, he let out a long puff of breath, spirits plummeting further than he believed possible as he reached for the doorknob. He absolutely did not want to do this.

"Hello, Draco," Luna said airily as he entered, closing the door quickly behind him and muttering at the door until the quiet click of a bolt sliding home soothed him into glancing at her.

"Yeah," he replied, dropping his bag on one of the desks shoved against the wall.

"You don't want to be here," she said after watching him for a moment, her head tilted inquisitively, a bit of a sad cast to her eyes. Not that he noticed—he was too busy trying not to think about the fact that he was alone with her, in a dusty room with a locked door between them and the rest of the school, and _Merlin_, why was that so compelling?

"Who would?" he shot back a bit too venomously. He avoided looking at her, occupying his eyes with trying to find the bit of parchment he'd used to plan a vague—very, very vague—lesson.

"Well, I'd assumed you were a bit alright with the idea considering that you elected yourself to help, but it's entirely possible that I was wrong to do so. People do change their minds."

He grunted noncommittally, nudging his bag away with an inward curse. His lesson plan had gone missing, and even though he really didn't need it to remember where he was going with this, it was still aggravating. Everything was aggravating lately.

"You know, I wouldn't blame you if you had changed your mind. You're welcome to leave, if you'd like. People aren't very fond of me, so I'm used to being shunted aside," she said, peering quite intently at his hunched shoulders.

His shoulders softened when he thought about what she had said, though, and he turned to look at her impassively. Luna Lovegood, always alone until Potter the hero came along and showed her compassion, and people still hated her anyway. It was understandable, she was very weird after all, but Draco suddenly realized how lonely she probably was most of the time. He barely had time to notice anymore, but he sort of knew how she felt.

He summoned a surge of energy from somewhere in his bedraggled body, probably taking several years off his life in doing so, but he wasn't really planning on living very long at this point.

"Idiot," he sneered, eyebrow arching as his eyes twinkled in an ominous manner. "Why would I walk out on a chance to ridicule Loony Lovegood?"

"Oh." She paused, and it looked a bit like she was withholding a smile. "I suppose there's that."

He snorted.

"Yes, that," he said before sobering a bit and narrowing his eyes at her. "Where's your wand?"

She blinked and reached for her left ear, looking quietly baffled when her fingers found no strip of wood tangled in with her mess of blonde curls.

"That's peculiar," she said, turning to riffle around in her bag rather quicker than she usually moved. She stiffened abruptly, which piqued his curiosity quite a lot, considering that she didn't turn around despite the fact that her wand was now very clearly clutched in her hand.

"Oi, I haven't got all night."

She stood at that, combing a hand through her hair in an almost sheepish manner. He caught a glimpse of her face as her hair shifted.

Was—was she _blushing_? Merlin, the world was bonkers.

"Nor do I. I did plan on getting some pudding from the kitchens before bed," she said, fussing with the front of her robes, toeing her bag further against the wall, tightening the tie in her hair, really doing anything to stall, it seemed.

When she finally turned to face him, her face was quite normally colored, which made him squint at her. She returned his look with her usual innocent and wide-eyed gaze.

_She's insane_, he thought before shaking it off and getting down to business.

"All right, let's see your grip, first," he said, folding his arms across his chest.

"What does grip have to do with Transfiguration?" she asked, looking bemused even as her hand tightened on her wand.

Draco sighed, pulling his own wand out of his sleeve with a sense of great impatience.

"Everything. Grip has everything to do with everything," he said, gesturing her closer half-heartedly. "Mediocre witches and wizards assume that how you hold your wand is simply a matter of personal anatomy, all based on how you hold a quill, and how your hand is shaped. They're mediocre mostly for that reason—if you hold your wand the same way for every spell, you're going to see an astronomical difference in your magical skills. I've never understood why they don't teach grips to first years—it ought to be basic knowledge."

Luna's eyes had widened, and she ran a finger over her wand with a definite reverence, making sparks shoot from the end. He noted absently that she was left-handed, which honestly shouldn't have surprised him.

"See, the way you hold your wand—" He circled her wrist with one hand, stowing his wand in his pocket so he could indicate the delicate spread of her fingers, the slight downward angle of her wrist, and the way her knuckles pointed towards the floor. "—is very indirect. It's aesthetically-conscious, which is not how magic works." He paused, peering at her quizzically. "What are your hobbies?"

"I paint, I suppose," she answered, blinking at him owlishly.

"Would you hold a paintbrush like that?"

"Not at all. You wouldn't have any control over the—oh! Fascinating!"

She quickly adjusted her grip, twisting her wrist just enough to bring her knuckles onto a diagonal with the floor, her fingers shifting into a firmer grouping, all seemingly habitual, though it was obviously new to her where a wand was involved.

"Good," he said, nodding and releasing her arm. "That's a good place to start, considering that the rest is just miniscule variations on the same thing. It makes sense once you think about it. Are you stupid enough that I have to go over it, or can you figure it out?"

He smirked at her, one eyebrow arching.

"I'm sure I'll manage," she replied airily, still evaluating her wand hand. Her eyes had gone all twinkly and bird-bright, and the angle of her head as she peered at her hand abruptly called to mind the finch, chirruping and cocking its head twitchily, as though constantly asking questions.

Shaking the image out of his head, he looked away, trying to reorder his thoughts. Something about the girl derailed him without her even doing anything odd.

"Well," he hedged, scowling at a crack in the stone of the far wall, "what was the first spell you remember having trouble with?"

"_Fera verto_," she said, looking up at him. "I did comment on water goblets for a reason."

He rolled his eyes, muttering to himself about idiot Ravenclaws and wastes of time.

When he looked at her again, she was smiling, which was peculiar. What a surprise.

"What?" he asked, face contorting.

"You're acting more like you used to," she said lightly. "Muttering and being flippant without all the anger. It's nice."

"_Nice_? You are so _weird_."

Her smile widened.

"That seems to be the common opinion."

Feeling off-center again, he frowned at her, mulling her words over for an all too brief moment before snapping back to reality.

"Stop distracting me. I want to get out of here as soon as possible, Lovegood," he snapped, pulling his wand out again and glaring at her. She persisted in smiling quietly.

"Right. Well. Wand movements. Show me what you do before you mangle your bloody toucan."

She obliged, picking a spot on the wall to aim at and saying, "_Fera verto!_" as she twisted her wand counter-clockwise.

He groaned, closing the gap between them as he reached for her wand arm again.

"Merlin," he said, "it's like being in bloody second year again. You don't twist your wand about like a key—it's more of a diagonal jab."

He prodded her wrist, making her loosen it before he let go, demonstrating with his own wand.

"Like that. No, no, not forward, downward. Like you're…ugh, I dunno, thrusting with a sword or something. _Only smaller_, don't flail about like a bloody Grindylow. You do that, you'll stab the bloody thing instead of transfigure it."

Despite her initial ineptitude, she caught on quickly. He quipped at her about Ravenclaws and their insufferable academia before stunning a rat that had been lurking under one of the farthest desks.

"Now," he said, dropping the thing on the desk and aiming a pointed look at her. "Try not to kill it."

Looking a bit worried, but fascinated all the same, she peered down at the rat, apologized under her breath—for transfiguring innocent animals into inanimate objects had always bothered her—and performed what felt like her first successful transfiguration since the beginning of second year.

She grinned at the water goblet, swaying a bit in celebration before looking up at Draco and nearly blinding him with that same smile.

"I didn't actually expect you to be helpful!" She looked back at the goblet. "Though I suppose that wasn't a very nice thing to think."

"I don't give a damn about niceness," he muttered, fighting the heat that had blossomed in his face—and neck and ears, _oh Merlin_—when she looked at him like _that_. Why did she have to be pretty _and_ bizarre? Couldn't she have just picked one or the other and stuck with it?

He groaned internally and decided that he was doomed.

Five minutes later, she had transfigured the same rat three times, with Draco reversing the spell with an absent flick of his wand, mind spending more time fighting with itself, eyes too busy watching the twinkle in her eyes fluctuate between fascination and full out glee.

Yes, he was doomed.

* * *

Two weeks later, she showed up five minutes late, cheeks pink from running.

"Professor McGonagall handed our grades back for the last test and practical," she puffed, bag dangling from her elbow as it had slipped off her shoulder when she leaned back against the door to close it. "I got a B!"

Draco nodded from his perch on a desk, watching her as she caught her breath and stared unseeingly out the window. She had improved at an alarming rate, barely needing his help with a majority of the spells after she had started to understand the correlation between tiny alterations in the way she held her wand and the success of her spells. Honestly, he was surprised she hadn't gotten an A, though that was probably just McGonagall being a cow, as per usual.

He couldn't quite match her enthusiasm, though. She was quiet, but he could tell that her brain was humming with triumph and validation, and that she was longing to smile so hard her cheeks hurt, or hug him as she had done that one horrible, agonizing time a few days ago, when she had finally mastered the—

"She did want to know who I got help from, though," Luna said, interrupting his thoughts. He blinked and realized that she was now looking straight at him, expression quizzical. He tensed.

"Who wanted to know?" he asked, having gotten quite off the subject in his head.

"Professor McGonagall."

Ah. That explained that look on her face. If it had been a student, he knew she wouldn't have minded giving a vague reply and breezing away. Teachers, though, she couldn't stand lying to. It was something he had learned quite quickly, from the few times she had vehemently refused to cut class to practice, no matter how good the excuse.

"_I'm practicing so that I can earn better marks_," she had written under his note, blotting the paper several times in her hurry to reply and, he guessed, her firm feelings on the subject. "_It would hardly make sense to not go to class_."

"I didn't tell her who had helped me," she said, though her tone of voice made him frown. She sounded…not happy with that.

"You can't honestly feel bad about lying about something ridiculous like that," he scoffed.

Her eyes skated away, and she drummed her fingers against her leg absently.

"It wasn't lying," she murmured. "Obfuscation still counts as untruthfulness, though."

"Merlin, Lovegood," he said, scrubbing at his eyes, "I don't have the time or patience for this right now. Do you want my help or not?"

Her eyes darted back to him, hand tightening into a loose fist around her robes.

"I would like your help," she said after a moment's hesitation. She paused a moment longer, her fingers relinquishing their grip. "I think I would prefer it if you went to sleep, though."

He blinked.

"What?"

"Sleep. You've circles under your eyes again, and you look quite wan."

Damn her and her concern.

He sighed, looking at the floor. He heard her set her bag on the floor, watched her feet and the hem of her robes come into his circle of vision. Her proximity set his teeth on edge, and he flashed his eyes at her, but she persisted in pressing a hand to his forehead.

"Really, Draco," she said quietly, eyeing him. "Go sleep. I'm quite alright for the moment, and you were going to spend this time helping me anyway."

He grunted, muttered, "Like I care if you're alright," and slid off the desk. Edging around her, he grabbed his own bag and left, the door standing open behind him as he trudged off to his dormitory.

It was true, he was extraordinarily tired, and Pansy had been giving him disturbing looks in the last few days. Valentine's Day always made him want to scream, but the whole lead-up to the mess was somehow worse this year. For all that Luna was peculiar and socially inept, at least she didn't bother him to get her sweets on ridiculous holidays.

* * *

He didn't know what had happened, but when Luna passed the Slytherin table the next morning, she didn't catch his eye. She didn't even look at him. She didn't return his note after first period, asking about time later to make up for the time he spent sleeping yesterday, she didn't reply to his second note, asking what had got her tetchy or whatever nonsense was wrong, and when he saw her in the hall on the way to lunch, her eyes widened in his direction, and she paled, deliberately looking away from him as she darted into the Great Hall.

"What the—"

"Hey, Draco, did you hear?"

Theodore Nott was grinning at him as he walked towards their table, not noticing the state of Draco's frown.

"What?" he asked, disinterested in every possible way, too busy following Luna's path towards the Ravenclaw table.

"Weasley's in the hospital wing. Someone poisoned him. Bloody brilliant, if you ask me," Nott said, laughing as he sat next to Draco, continuing to not notice as the blond froze, the blood draining from his cheeks.

"Poisoned? How?" he asked, suddenly feeling an urgent need to know.

"Some whiskey or something Slughorn gave him, I dunno."

"Shit," Draco said, sinking into his chair blankly. _Shit shit shit._

Well, at least he knew why Luna wasn't talking to him now.


	6. Chapter 6

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Harry Potter. I do own mood swingy Draco, though-I've made him so crazy that he's no long J.K. Rowling's original character. Oh God, I've spoiled everything. Oops.

**a/n:** You know, I'm never sure about POV switches in the middle of chapters. I couldn't keep writing for Pansy, though—I feel reeeally uncomfortable in her head, it's not even funny. She'll be back, though, so be warned. Also, OH MY GOD I UPDATED TWICE IN TWO DAYS WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN. (You're welcome.)

* * *

Pansy Parkinson shifted in her armchair, her fingernails clicking together as she picked at them. She had been staring at her Potions homework for the better part of half an hour, and had yet to write two words. She wasn't really intent on doing it, anyway. She was far too absorbed in mulling over Draco's truly bizarre behavior of late. Waiting for him had become her newest pastime, though Blaise told her to give up every time he passed through on the way to his dormitory or the library or wherever he bloody went and found her sitting there, staring unseeingly at some bit of parchment or other. If she'd had the energy, she would have called him a hypocrite, because he wasn't giving it up—all he ever did these days was order first years to follow Draco between classes and mutter with Theodore and Crabbe and Goyle about whatever news the terrified twerp had brought him. It was proof, she supposed, that Draco was being odder than usual, but still, it was bothersome to have him call her an idiot for waiting for Draco even as he left the common room again to go interrogate some squeaky first year about what she had heard Draco muttering about as he wandered towards the Room of Requirement.

She just wanted to know what he was doing, where he went all the time. She knew about his mission on a vague scale, knew that he'd been spending hours in the Room of Requirement since the start of the year, but recently…recently he'd been going somewhere else. Sending notes after class, creeping off to obscure corners of the castle. It was almost like he was going behind all of their backs for a girl, going to snog her in abandoned classrooms like he had always done with Pansy until he pushed her away a month ago. It was honestly baffling, having him so suddenly cut her off, leave her hanging. He hadn't even said anything about it.

"Hey," someone said beside her, drawing Pansy out of her thoughts with a jump and a wince as she nicked a cuticle with her fingernail.

"What do you want, Blaise?" she said, glaring at him as he sat in the chair next to hers, dark eyes fixed on her.

"I just came to tell you what we found out today," he said, quiet so the Slytherins scattered about the room wouldn't hear him.

"Dammit, Blaise, I don't care what your vile first year slaves have to say about Draco." She turned to glare into the fire, folding her arms tightly across her chest.

"You'll care about this. Just listen. At lunch, Nott told Malfoy about Weasley getting poisoned, prat that he is, and Malfoy swore and bolted his lunch and darted off somewhere. He thought he'd just gone to the Room of Requirement, but the second year I told to spend his lunch nearby said he didn't see Malfoy anywhere. Crabbe skipped Charms, though, and he found Malfoy hunched up, writing something. Of course, he wouldn't show whatever it was, but he threw it away in the common room bin. He really is an idiot."

Blaise handed her a bit of blotted, crumpled parchment, all of the writing scratched out. She could read it if she squinted.

"It wasn't for him, I didn't think Slughorn would—" she read, barely pausing to let the fragment sink in. She went on. "It's the idiot's fault, he shouldn't have—Aren't you supposed to be some kind of saint who never blames anyone? I'm sorry. I'll keep tutoring you if—"

She blinked, her mouth falling open.

"Oh my _God_," she said, looking up at Blaise, eyes blown wide. "_Draco_ poisoned him? And he's tutoring someone. Merlin, I wish we knew. Could you find out?"

The boy across from her grinned lazily, leaning back in his chair.

"Of course I can. He's not exactly doing a good job of covering his tracks, is he? At the rate he's going, we'll have this figured out by tomorrow. Honestly, he's really lost his touch this year. He's cracking up."

Pansy sobered up quickly, eyes falling to the paper in her hands, a sigh building between her ribs.

"He really is," she said quietly, fingers tightening on the parchment. "If he would just talk to us…"

Blaise snorted.

"Has he ever talked to us?"

She looked up, gaze earnest.

"He used to! He used to actually try for us, too. Sit with us and laugh. He used to be wonderful."

"Pansy, honestly. We all know he's just friends with us because it's convenient. That's how it works. Convenience. I'll tell you if we find anything else," he said, pushing himself to his feet. Stuffing his hands into his pockets, he glided to the stairs to the boy's dormitory, leaving a grim-faced Pansy in his wake.

"That's not true," she said to herself, looking back at Draco's smudged handwriting with a heavy frown. "We used to be genuine. Before all this."

* * *

Draco dropped his head on his desk, loosing an almighty sigh that had Crabbe and Goyle giving him peculiar looks.

The last few days had been torture for him. The Vanishing Cabinet still didn't work, Weasley wasn't out of hospital yet, the Golden Trio was short one and had taken to glaring holes in the back of his head whenever they saw him, which made going to the Great Hall even less appealing than it usually was. Unfortunately, when he skipped meals, there was no Luna waiting outside the Room of Requirement with bundles of food, so he had managed to eat two meals in the span of three days, plus an apple or two that he stole from first years. His already spotty sleeping patterns were further disrupted by a totally illogical concern for Luna's sudden hatred for—and, seemingly, fear of—him, Pansy and Blaise were flat out not speaking to him, though he kept catching them whispering to each other in the common room, at which point they would freeze and follow him with their eyes as he passed through. Zabini seemed more menacing than usual, and Nott wasn't sitting with him in History of Magic anymore. He didn't know why it bothered him—it wasn't as if he was actually fond of any of them. There was a sting, though, to be abruptly rejected by people with whom you'd pretended to be friends for five and a half years.

_Now I know how Lovegood feels_, he thought morosely, listening to the sound of his classmates shuffling paper about while they waited for Professor Vector to dismiss the fifth year she was lecturing. Several Slytherins sniggered, making the Hufflepuff beside Professor Vector's desk stiffen and flush.

If he were to be honest with himself, and Merlin did he wish he would stop doing just that, he sort of…missed Lovegood. She had such an odd way of taking his mind off things, making him exasperated with her dottiness or the way she took their, as she called it, "contract" so seriously. He missed telling her she was abysmal at Transfiguration and watching her puff up like the little finch did when it saw a cat, the way her eyes would flash in an almost dangerous way, the way she would let it go a second later with an odd quirk of her eyebrows. He missed watching her twirl her hair around a finger while he talked about things she already knew, the only sign of her impatience and boredom the increasingly tight knot of blonde around her knuckle.

It had only been a month since she popped in on him and threw him off-balance that first time, and already he had got over the desire to laugh at her bizarreness, and the knee jerk reaction to unusualness that all sane wizards had. He no longer backpedaled at the thought of seeing her, though it certainly threw a lump into his throat when he thought about anyone seeing him talking to her without sneering. In fact, he had sort of…grown fond of the few hours a week he spent in her company.

Thinking about it, his heart did a dumb little flutter, and he knocked his head against his desk again, squeezing his eyes shut to block the thought from slipping in that she really was quite—

_No, no, shut up_, he told himself, wishing he could tear out his hair or chuck something out the window. Professor Vector was clearing her throat at the front of the room, though, so he forced himself to sit up and pull his quill out of his bag, a resigned look on his face.

None of this was going to turn out well, he just knew it.

* * *

When Weasley got out of the Hospital Wing and Luna still wasn't talking to him, Draco decided he had had enough. She was the one who had forced herself on him—who was she to take herself away for something as stupid as this? It had been a mistake. It wasn't like he knew Slughorn offered drinks to his bloody students.

Stepping out of Charms for a bathroom break, he pulled a torn bit of parchment from his pocket and scrawled, "It's trite, and you'll probably think it's insincere even though it isn't, but I'm sorry." Tapping it with his wand, he spelled it into a small, irregular paper airplane and asked it to wait the half hour till classes were out for lunch outside Luna's classroom. The thing whizzed off, and he waited until it had turned the corner to slip back into the classroom.

Hopefully that would cure her of her newfound shiftiness long enough for him to explain to her that it was hardly his fault that Weasley had nearly dropped dead. Hopefully she would at least start bringing him food again, or maybe even smiling at him. He did rather miss her smiles—they were so vague, a thousand times quieter than the gaudy, raucous, tooth-flashing things people threw about. Not to mention how nice her mouth was…

Oh yes. He was doomed.

* * *

When Draco left Charms thirty minutes later, it was with a feeling of foreboding. If he hadn't been thrust through the doorway along with the crush of sixth years fleeing in the direction of food, he would have crept out, stupidly terrified as he was that he would burst into flame as the result of Luna's incoherent rage at his blatant attempt to revive their…what was it, friendship? Merlin, he was friends with Loony Lovegood.

Nothing terrible happened, though, not even when he reached the end of the hallway and turned down the next corridor, heading for the stairs. He began to feel confident that his life wasn't drawing to a close, and that maybe she would simply send him a nice note asking him to stay away from her, or perhaps she would choose not to reply, as she had done to the handful of notes he had sent her over the past week.

His hopes plummeted, though, when he got down to the second floor to find her peering down the hall in his direction, expression rather more serious than he was used to seeing. Her eyes landed on him almost immediately, and they hardened as her spine straightened. She didn't blink as he approached, though he looked away enough times for both of them, hoping she would let him walk past without harm.

He moved past her, though, and none the worse for wear. He realized, though, that this was the test. She was asking him to acknowledge her, because when he turned, she had turned her gaze to follow him, silvery blue eyes still laced with some kind of threat, and more than a little of the fear he had seen the last time she had made eye contact with him.

"Merlin's testicle," he muttered, running a hand over his face before weaving back through the crowd—which was, fortunately, dispersing—towards her. She stiffened further, hands clenching tightly around the strap of her bag.

When he stood in front of her, his eyebrows raised, she said:

"Daddy always told me not to talk to people I'm scared of in private."

"So you're scared of me?" he asked, heart doing something funny when she sighed and looked away.

"You almost killed one of my friends," she said quietly. Draco rolled his eyes.

"No, I didn't. That was circumstance, not me. And anyway, how do you know it was me who poisoned it? I didn't put my name on the bloody bottle—what a lark that would've been. 'Happy Christmas, you old sod, hope you enjoy dying. Love, Draco.'"

Her eyes darted back to him, a deep frown working itself into the corners of her mouth, creasing the space between her eyebrows.

"I knew it was you because the last time someone nearly died, it was your fault. The last time someone was carrying something deadly to Professor Dumbledore, it was from you, we all know it was," she said sharply, though he heard the hesitation in the accusation. Obviously, Luna was new to being angry.

"Look," he said huskily, pressing his hand to his eyes to keep whatever turmoil was roiling just under the surface at bay. He could feel hot tears pricking at the backs of his eyes, and a lump in his throat, and he wanted to scream that none of this was his fault. If they wanted someone to blame, go blame the bloody Dark Lord, or his idiot father for getting caught in the Ministry with You-Know-Who. "I don't have an excuse, and frankly, it wouldn't matter if I did. If you don't want to…shit, I don't know—"

"Draco."

He squeezed his eyes shut tighter, tensing when he felt her hand on his arm. She hesitated a moment, her fingers gentle, before dropping her hand to squeeze his.

"We're all scared. You and me and Harry and Ron and everyone. No one is left out of this war, even those who don't know about." Her voice was tight, as was her grip. "I'm scared of you because I'm scared of who you're working for, but I'm also scared _for_ you. I know you don't want to do this. Any of it."

The burning in his eyes intensified, and it got very hard to breathe. He pressed his hand into his eyes, willing the tears and the mortification away, trying to summon the strength to throw her off and call her an idiot. The problem was, though, that he had let her in. He had lowered his defenses for her, which is why he had got bothered when she started ignoring him, why he had found himself missing her, and now that she was back, he couldn't make himself stop being weak. He couldn't turn away and fake bravado, or sneer at her, or any of it, because he had allowed himself to like her as a person, and acknowledge her worth. And dammit, he had trusted her, and now where had it got him? Bloody crying in public.

He hadn't made a sound or opened his eyes, but without prompting, Luna glanced about and tugged on his hand, leading him into a passage behind a tapestry of gorgons.

"I'll leave if you'd like," she said quietly, having waited a moment to consider.

He shook his head without thinking about it, the motion jerky. He let out a breath he'd been holding, the shaking in the puff of air making her hand tighten on his. She was looking at him carefully, trying to decide what to do with a distraught Draco. It seemed to be the same situation one would find oneself in with a Hippogriff that needed help badly. Without the Hippogriff's approval, approaching was dangerous, and death was likely, but the creature would die or the like if one allowed fear to rule the decision. So which option should one choose?

Taking a leap of faith, she let go of his hand to wrap her arms around him, gentle and cautious, waiting for the tensing and the cursing and the pushing away, as he had done the first and only other time she had done this.

The cursing didn't happen, though the tensing did, until he released another shuddering breath and dropped his head onto her shoulder. One of his arms looped around her back, the other occupying itself with tangling fingers in her hair. Her wand was knocked to the floor, but she chose not to mind, busying herself with patting his back. She could hear him sniffling in a way that he probably thought was quiet, but was in fact quite loud. She did rather hope he couldn't hear her heart beating.

They stayed like that for a good while, something like ten minutes passing while Draco fought back sobs and screams, though he did manage to get the shoulder of Luna's robes rather damp. She patted his back carefully, wondering acutely whether she ought to say something, and why she so dearly longed to press her face into his neck.

She did neither of those things, standing silent and solid until he shifted, pushing her away in the gentlest of ways so he could trudge to the other end of the passage and sink to the floor. He dragged his sleeve across his face, mopping up tears and trying to breathe normally again.

Luna retrieved her wand from the floor, returning it to its traditional perch behind her ear while she seated herself against the opposite wall on the opposite end of the corridor. She watched him out the corner of her eyes, curling her knees to her chest and resting her chin on them.

After another few minutes of silence, she shifted to gaze at the ceiling, her head tilting.

"You haven't eaten since yesterday," she mused aloud. He sniffed in response, shooting her a glance. Honestly, he didn't much care right now, no matter how much his stomach wished he did.

"Stay here," she said, looking at him briefly before retreating beyond the tapestry. He could hear her footsteps as she went down the stairs. She had left her bag.

About ten minutes later, she returned with two napkinfuls of food, one for him and one for herself.

"I would have brought pumpkin juice, as well, but I haven't quite perfected conjuring things, and I didn't fancy conjuring a Fluted Florisnack instead of a flask. They're quite angry creatures—nobody would have survived," she said matter-of-factly, dropping one of the bundles in his lap as she sat beside him.

"A Fluted _what_?" he asked, squinting at her through puffy eyes.

"Florisnack. They've got wonderful plumage, all yellow and purple, but they're very poisonous, and their fangs are really terrible to look at. Or so I've heard—I've never seen one myself." She untied her napkin, picking a few chips out of the mess of food.

"You know you're insane, don't you?"

She laughed airily.

"I'm quite sane, Draco. It's everyone else who needs to reevaluate what they call reality," she said with a smile in his direction. She dedicated herself to her food after that, preferring to mull things over as she ate her way through a sandwich and a bunch of grapes.

He wasn't quite sure what to make of this—any of it. He was having lunch with Luna, and he was quite comfortable, aside from the itchiness in his eyes from the crying and the peculiar jitters he got when her shoulder brushed his. The voice in his head that he had grown to detest expressed regret that he hadn't at least paid attention to the feeling of her hair under his fingers, but he batted the thought away to live with the rest of the proof of his burgeoning insanity. He noted, however, that he felt…quiet. Calm. Clean and relieved, and there wasn't even any of the embarrassment he ought to have felt. After all, he had broken down in front of another person, which he hadn't done since he was small.

It was Luna's silence, he supposed, that made it alright. The fact that she didn't feel the need to look at him hesitantly or ask him if he was alright. She knew that he likely wasn't alright, and wouldn't be for a good long while, namely because she was far from alright herself. They were both scared, as she had pointed out, and it wasn't likely to stop being like that anytime soon, so what was the point in probing? May as well enjoy moments of peace when they drifted by, let them linger.

He glanced at her, studying her profile, tracing the curl of her eyelashes, the delicate line of her nose, the shape her lips made against the backdrop of the—

"Shit, your robes," he said quite suddenly, his face coloring as he noticed the wet spot.

She blinked and looked down, thinking she had spilled something on herself until he tugged his wand out of his sleeve and pointed it at her shoulder. Steam escaped from the fabric as it dried, and she looked surprised at the look on his face.

"Crying does tend to produce liquid," she said, mirth lurking somewhere in her airy tone.

"Shut up," he said, his ears growing hot as well. She laughed again, covering her mouth with her hand.

He watched her, feeling irritation pique. He hadn't been teased in years, it seemed, and having it come from Luna was genuinely disturbing. Or so he told himself—in reality, he was irritated that the color in his face had quickly stopped being about the crying all over her robes, and was now about the growing realization that he had hugged her and not let go, and she had hugged him back and blimey, she was small, wasn't she? And her hair was soft, if he remembered correctly. She smelled rather nice, and when she was pressed against him—

"I have to go," he said mechanically. Fortunately, he had finished his food, and she hers, so it was slightly less awful for him to grab his bag and dart out the other end of the passage.

She blinked after him, feeling confused. Had he remembered a test he had to study for? How odd.


	7. Chapter 7

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Harry Potter.

**a/n:** I am so sorry I'm so slow at updating, you guys. I just. I run really hot and cold on actual writing fuel, much though I sort of eat, sleep, and breathe this fic, because I love how it's happening in my head. I'll try really hard to be more consistent, but I'm sorry, I can't really promise anything. Maybe if I get my schedule worked out I'll be able to get better. Anyway. I hope you like this chapter—it's a bit of a babblerant or something, but I had fun playing in heads other than Draco's. Writing Luna is so much fun~ Oh, and the riddle she's thinking about is: One by one we come to life and side by side we wait, while our company swells in number some come early some come late. Some will bore you, some enthrall, but you cannot choose between us, you must take us one and all, because we're bound together tightly and we're naught if we break free; if you want some clues about us simply answer who are we? And the answer is chapters.

* * *

Skin and lips, hands in his hair, thin and long-fingered. A wand clattered to the floor, pushed from behind an ear as hands tangled in curls. A back pressed into a wall, breath hot on faces as they parted. Kisses against a smooth, pale jawline, a long neck, soft noises as he reached a collarbone, and he smirked against her skin, opening his eyes to eye her flushed cheeks, the way her lips were parted, the way her eyes opened wide and met his, and his smirk widened even as he—

Draco jumped into wakefulness, feeling heat in his skin, panic in his heart.

_Who was I dreaming about_, he asked himself frantically, wishing that the first thing to come to mind wasn't long, pale, blonde hair and delicate, rosy lips, a dotty expression on her face as she peered at him through the cipher of his memory.

He groaned, sitting up, willing the heat in his stomach away as he pushed his hair out of his face.

* * *

"Mr. Zabini!"

Blaise turned, eyes dropping several feet to the flushed face of a Hufflepuff first year, the boy's breath coming in puffs. Evidently, he had run all the way to the Great Hall.

They stood just outside the doors, the smell of dinner setting Blaise's stomach to grumbling. He glared at the Hufflepuff, folding his arms across his chest.

"What is it?" he asked, voice cold.

"I found—f-found out who—" the boy panted, pressing a hand to his chest, blinking up at Blaise. "—who Malfoy is t-tutoring."

Blaise's eyes widened, and he glanced around quickly before pulling the first year into a passage under one of the staircases.

"Who is it?" he hissed, leaning towards the wide-eyed eleven-year-old.

It took the boy a few tries and several moments of puffing and scared stuttering, but he eventually gave Blaise a name, to which Blaise responded by swearing loudly.

"Merlin, you've got to be kidding me," he said, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers.

"N-no, Mr. Zabini," the Hufflepuff said, cowering against the wall.

Blaise stared at him for a moment before seizing him by the back of his robes and tossing him out of the corridor. The boy squeaked and fled into the Great Hall, shooting a terrified glance backwards as he ran.

"You really ought to make them call you 'sir'," a voice said from behind him.

Blaise turned, arching an eyebrow at Pansy where she stood, leaning against the wall with a moue of disgust fixed on her face.

"The filthy little half-bloods. Honestly, I don't know why you talk to them," she said, pushing away from the wall to pace towards him.

"They would be far too intimidated if I had them call me 'sir'. No one would report back, and I certainly don't have time to follow Malfoy around myself," he replied with a smirk, eyeing her as she flashed her eyes at him.

"Or you could stop having him followed," she riposted harshly. He snorted.

"Then we would never learn anything."

Pansy sighed, twisting her mouth around thoughtfully for a moment before straightening. She propped her hands on her hips and gave Blaise her most imperious look, nose tilted into the air, eyebrows lifted to full mast.

"Well," she said, a haughty half-smirk tugging at her lips, "if you're learning so much from them then I suppose you have something to tell me."

"No," he replied, any trace of amusement in his face gone. "I have nothing to tell you."

She huffed, eyes narrowing. He was obviously evading her, the way he wasn't meeting her eyes, and he knew he was being rather blunt in refusing to answer, but honestly, he didn't want to see the look on Pansy's face. She would absolutely combust.

"You swore, Blaise. He told you something, I know it."

She took a step closer, pinning him with her eyes.

_Merlin_, he thought, eyes darting back and forth between her hard glare and the wall behind her as he fought for a way to get out of this. Yes, he had wanted to know what Draco was doing, and yes, his main motive was to find their fellow Slytherin in a compromising situation, breaking Pansy's foul little heart and making her run to the only person offering her compassion, which, of course, would be Blaise. Hearing what he had just heard, though…if he told her, she wouldn't cry and get upset. She would storm off and scare the snot out of the Ravenclaw in question, because honestly, Lovegood was not someone Pansy would be scared of shouting at, and then Draco would get angry at Pansy, and Blaise, and everyone, and it would all just…collapse. Not that he minded anarchy, but it was a bit obnoxious.

"Blaise," she hissed when his silence had dragged too long, grabbing a fistful of his robes and dragging him down to her level. "I swear on Granger's grave, if you don't tell me this instant, I will hex you out of existence."

He groaned, squeezing his eyes shut before shoving her away, ignoring her huff as she collided with the wall rather harder than he had intended.

"It's Lovegood, alright?" he said, glaring down at her as her eyes widened and her face paled and then flushed, all in the span of several seconds.

"Lovegoo—_Lovegood_? _Loony_ Lovegood?" she asked, voice brimming with incredulity. "No, no, you've—you've _got _to be kidding me. Blaise! _Tell me you're joking!_"

"Merlin's—I told you you didn't want to know. You see what happens when you nag? I'm going to eat. Have fun tormenting Lovegood," he replied, rolling his eyes and turning on his heel. She stammered inarticulately after him, mouth working around syllables that weren't quite forming words.

He knew without looking that, two minutes later, she stomped off in the general direction of the Ravenclaw common room, eyes hard and cold and angry as bits of sharp metal.

* * *

"One by one we come to life and side by side we wait," she murmured, eyes on the ceiling as her fingers traced the stone of the wall beside her. "…some come early, some come late. Hmmm."

Luna stopped walking when her toe hit the edge of a stair. She looked down, head tilted at the offending object, as she wondered what it was doing there. After all, she had been going down stairs, not up them, and it was rather odd to have a stair in relief when it should have been in depression. She supposed, after a moment of careful thought, that she had been going the wrong way, and so she turned in the opposite direction after glancing around vaguely.

Picking up her rhythm again, she drifted back to the riddle Professor Flitwick had told her after Charms, mumbling the lines as she pieced bits of semantics together. She was so abstracted that she was surprised to find herself shoved against a wall quite abruptly, a girl about her height glaring into her face with rather an unpleasant expression.

"Hello, Pansy," Luna said after a pause filled with the Slytherin girl's incoherent snarling. "You look rather upset."

"Hello? _Hello?_ You little twat," she nearly shrieked, hands tightening in the front of Luna's robes. How odd—Luna hadn't noticed that her robes were being so sadly handled. She ought to say something…then again, Pansy was talking about something in shrill tones, and considering the alarming color of the girl's face, Luna thought she really ought to listen.

"—seducing him, which is vile and _for the love of everything holy_, what in _Merlin's name_ gave you the idea that you were worthy of so much as _looking_ at him? You're a foul little Muggle-lover unfit to be called a witch, and you belong in St. Mungo's along with all the other loony people, because you know what, Lovegood? You're bloody _insane_."

Ah, no, she didn't want to listen to this. After all, her tear ducts were hardwired to her ears, so it really was better to just let Pansy talk without being heard, and anyway, this riddle was so very perplexing.

Pansy continued in that way for several minutes, shaking and shouting and occasionally pulling Luna way from the wall just far enough to shove her against it again. The blonde had enough presence of mind to keep her head held a bit forward to avoid cracking her skull against the stone, but she did rather think her back would be an unfortunate color tomorrow. Especially her shoulder blades.

But then Pansy stopped talking and merely breathed heavily, eyes never leaving Luna's face. She looked as though the fight had drained out of her, something heavy about her shoulders when Luna blinked back into the present and said, "Oh. Chapters. That wasn't difficult at all."

She watched Pansy blink distantly, hoping that the dark-haired girl would simply scoff and leave. Unfortunately, something about the non-sequitur seemed to have sparked her rage anew, and suddenly there was a wand at Luna's throat as Pansy pressed too close to her, breath fanning across her face as she hissed.

"Stay away from him, Lovegood, or I swear you'll never walk the same."

And much though Luna did a good job of ignoring threats and things, the whole situation became so much more immediate when there was a wand pressing against the soft underside of her jaw, feeling far too much like being caught by the Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries, all of the pure, unadulterated hatred and sanctimony pressing in on her consciousness, smothering her like a heavy blanket.

And then Pansy was gone, leaving Luna quivering against the wall, eyes wide and lips parted.

She stayed like that for several minutes, heartbeat slowing as she breathed in and out and in, her hands pressed flat against the stone holding her up. The coarse grain of the wall grated against her fingers as she pushed away from it, straightening her robes absently.

Now that she thought about it, the largest problem she had with what had just happened was that she didn't want to stay away from Draco—for she had no doubt that he was who Pansy was referring to. She enjoyed his company, especially after last Wednesday, when he had broken down. She hadn't particularly enjoyed watching him fall apart like that, but it hadn't exactly been unexpected, and something had shifted in their interactions afterwards. When he had run away so suddenly, she had hardly thought anything of it—people did forget things, after all, and remembering suddenly was really the only way anyone ever remembered anything—but when he had met her on Friday for another tutoring session, there had been something different about the way he existed in the room. He shifted more than usual, and when he wasn't distinctly avoiding looking at her, he was very much _looking_ at her, which was odd but nice, in a strange way. He did look quite pretty when his face eased away from the realms of terror and agony and exhaustion, so she was happy to see things that spoke of different emotions, but the thing that had been there recently. It looked like…fascination.

She knew the thing well enough. Luna was fascinated by almost everything, and so she knew what it looked like in nearly every form. She would know what it looked like if all she had to go by were someone's hands, or their shoulders, or their toes. And the way his eyes focused so hard between flickers, the way they would study one thing for the span of an entire blink before darting to a new thing a centimeter away from the first, and both of them were somewhere on her face, just shouted intrigue. And she wanted to know what he was intrigued by, because asking questions was what she did.

She didn't want to stay away from him, and she had thought that it was alright, but obviously they weren't being as careful as she'd thought they were. Oh, he would be furious if he knew that someone had found out that he was tutoring her, and he did look so tired when he got angry…

"Luna?"

She blinked, turning her head to see Harry standing a few feet away. Her head was jerked back a bit, her fingers twisted so much in the curls on one side that her freedom of movement was restricted.

She let her hair go carefully, pulling a small smile up at the concern in his eyes. She did so like Harry—he was just so nice.

"Hello, Harry," she said airily, no trace of her brooding showing on her face.

"What are you doing up here? You've missed dinner. Or, well, Ginny said she hadn't seen you," he said, peering at her carefully. "Are you alright?"

"I'm splendid. I was just thinking about a riddle Professor Flitwick told me, and I suppose I forgot to eat."

"Oh. Well, I was just…" He gestured down the corridor, which happened to lead in the general direction of the Gryffindor common room, or so Luna had guessed from the number of times she had run into Gryffindors around here.

She smiled and waved him down the hall absently, turning and walking in the opposite direction. He called a farewell after her—she merely hummed in response, feet picking up a rhythm as she walked, intending to head for the kitchens. Now that she'd had it pointed out to her, she was quite hungry, and the House Elves were very nice about missing meals. The pear in the painting was also quite amiable once one got it started talking. As it turned out, he rather disliked his duty. Being tickled for a living was quite uncomfortable.

* * *

Draco had just been walking. That was all he ever did, walk, and somehow walking always took him to these awful places that he never, ever wanted to go. Places like a perpendicular hallway when Pansy started shrieking about something or other, and say, wasn't that—

_Shit_, he thought, diving back around the corner when it registered that the person Pansy had cornered was Luna, and alright, yes, she was shouting about…him.

_Oh bloody, bloody Hell, how did she find out?_

But of course, that wasn't what he had to be worried about right now.

What he had to be worried about was the person who had just entered Draco's corridor.

"Oh, Merlin, bugger off, Potter," he hissed, leaning against the wall behind him and folding his arms across his chest in an attempt to look self-assured and at ease.

Harry, however, had other ideas.

"What're you doing up here, Malfoy? The Slytherin common room's in the dungeons, or did you forget?" he said, storming towards him with a particularly malicious glint in his eyes. Malfoy wanted to hex him right then and there, but he was trying to eavesdrop here, and making Potter shout would just complicate things.

"What, is taking a walk a crime now? You should pay mind to the fact that I'm a Prefect, Potter," Draco riposted, tweaking at his robes where his badge sat with a sneer. "I'm sure I could find _some_ way to take points off Gryffindor. Aggravated assault of a Headmaster-appointed student ambassador, maybe?"

Harry glared, and Draco got a little bit of vindictive joy from the knowledge that Potter's buttons were so easy to push. It was, in fact, why he had spent so much time tormenting him over the years. There was something wonderful about knowing exactly what lines to cross to get someone so absolutely furious that they couldn't form coherent sentences. He didn't have much energy for the sport anymore, though, so he shrugged Potter off and started ignoring him just in time to hear Pansy hiss, "Stay away from him, Lovegood, or I swear you'll never walk the same."

He tensed, knowing that tone in Pansy's voice quite well. If she said something in that voice, she wouldn't hesitate to follow through with it, which honestly meant that he and Luna were sort of screwed, because in the midst of all the recent idiocy, Draco had been forced to admit that he had, somewhere along the line, developed…Merlin, a crush on Luna Lovegood. A horrible, malignant crush that was eating away at his intelligence and turning him into a pile of stuttering mush whenever anyone said anything to do with her. If someone said something about Ravenclaw, or blue eyes, or—or food, or bloody Transfiguration, his mind was shot to Hell, and he had to consciously refrain from cracking his head against whatever blunt object was closest. Which meant that the last thing he particularly wanted to do was stay away from Luna.

Fortunately, Harry was too busy hissing inane threats and ultimatums at Draco to notice Pansy's seemingly concluded tirade, or the noise her footsteps made as she stomped around a far corner. Draco waited a few moments before stepping forward to prod Potter in the chest with a finger, glaring darkly at him.

"You're a pretentious fool with sickening delusions of honor, Potter. Now go away. Surely someone weak or downtrodden needs your help elsewhere."

Potter shoved him back and stormed around the corner, which Draco hadn't quite intended to make happen. After all, he was fairly certain that Luna was still in that corridor, and he had a truly disturbing need to make sure she was alright after having been assaulted by the vile Pansy. Potter getting into a conversation with her was sort of the last thing he wanted to happen, for equally disturbing reasons that he absolutely refused to get into.

He decided to wait a few moments to see if Potter wouldn't just…go away, which turned out to be quite a good decision indeed, considering that Luna was being her normal, dotty self, and it was rather difficult to keep up a conversation with her if you weren't trying very hard when she acted thusly.

When her humming sounded as though she were about to round the corner he drew himself to the middle of the hall and made to look as though he were simply passing by.

"Oh, hello, Draco," she said when she saw him, giving him a little smile, and Merlin, he was so, so doomed, because she was very pretty.

"Hello," he said in reply, which was a very stupid thing to say. Since when did Draco Malfoy say Hello when greeted? He really ought to have sniffed or asked when he had given her permission to speak to him in public, but then she wouldn't have lingered, and anyway, she _had_ missed dinner.

"This seems to be a popular corner of the castle today," she mused, tilting her head at him. "I'm glad you're not Pansy back to shout at me some more. Her voice is rather shrill and uncomfortable."

"Couldn't have put it better myself," he muttered, scowling at the floor for a moment before he realized that he ought to act surprised that Pansy had shouted at her—wasn't that what people did when they heard that their friends had gotten shouted at? He supposed it would have been easier if he hadn't eavesdropped on the shouting. Merlin, he was bad at having actual friends. Especially ones who looked at him like that, with eyes that were blue with very long lashes…

"I take it you don't like her very much," Luna said, stepping past him, but still looking at him in a way that said 'You can follow, if you'd like.' "Which is strange, because everyone tends to have the impression that you like her very much."

He snorted, falling into step beside her with a feeling of heat in his face that he hoped he was imagining.

"She's an idiot," he said simply, consciously putting more space between them when their hands brushed, which of course made that imaginary blush that really was very, very imaginary get darker. It didn't help that he was hyperaware of the fact that he had never really…walked somewhere with her before, which shouldn't have felt like such a monumental occasion as it did. He was so very doomed. "What was she shouting about?"

Luna sighed, and he glanced over to see that her eyes had drifted ceilingward, which was rather peculiar, which shouldn't have surprised him.

"She found out that you're tutoring me," she said, and Draco didn't have to try as hard as he thought he would to fake horror. The hiss that slipped between his teeth was quite natural, in fact—evidently, the mere thought of her knowing that he'd been spending time with Luna was enough to mortify him. Hence why he was doomed. "She was about as keen on the idea as I thought she'd be, which wasn't very much."

"Merlin," he sighed, palming his face as he got the chance to figure out what a mess Pansy Parkinson having this kind of blackmail material on him was. If she wasn't already spreading the news around the school, she'd have him groveling for mercy within the evening.

"We could stop, if you'd like," Luna said after a lapse, and she was peering at him blankly when he looked at her, his eyes wide and mouth already open to say that no, no, that wasn't necessary at all, really, he wouldn't want her grades to suffer over something tiny like Pansy's anger issues, when he realized that Luna might actually be asking him if they _could _stop. Which, of course, she wasn't, but he didn't know that.

"She threatened you," he said after a pause, their footsteps slowing at the top of a flight of stairs.

"She did."

Suddenly, he didn't really want to be walking with Luna anymore, because whether or not he had been worried about that threat, he hadn't expected Luna to bat an eyelash.

"Well, I didn't expect you to be scared of a total moron like her," he said sharply, starting to walk again without looking at her.

Luna stayed back for a moment, blinking after him. He heard her say, "What's that supposed to mean?" before hurrying after him. Obviously, his comment had rubbed her wrong, because she ducked around in front of him, standing on the step below him with a frown on her face quite like the one he'd seen the last time he had managed to poke at a sore spot.

"I am scared of her, yes," she said, scowling up at him. "I find it rather wise to be wary of people who pull wands on innocent parties, and anyway, I don't let fear keep me from things. Otherwise, I wouldn't still be talking to you."

It was a low blow, and he averted his gaze as his cheeks flushed again, though this time with shame.

After a moment, though, he got riled again and stepped down in front of her, expecting her to step back as was usual for someone who's space had just been so thoroughly invaded. She held her ground, though, and he was momentarily thrown.

"Look," he said, ignoring how nice she smelled now that he was this close, trying to distract himself by glaring. "As far as I'm concerned, anyone who has enough energy to be scared of Pansy Parkinson is an idiot. You faced down Death Eaters at the Ministry, surely you have better things to worry about."

Luna's jaw tightened, her breath puffing out in what was almost a huff. Her expression darkened.

"I have plenty of better things to worry about, but my friendship with you shouldn't be one of them. She frightens me because she has managed to challenge the only significant relationship I have at the moment. Harry and Ginny and the rest are wonderful, truly, but they don't actually talk to me. You do, Draco, no matter how much it pains you."

The wonderful thing about Luna, in Draco's opinion, was that even when she was upset, even when she was speaking with the feeling of urgency, she never rushed words, and she never raised her voice. There was nothing shrill about her, even though her cheeks were pink with vehemence, and she was frowning at him, and really, he blamed what he did next on her.

"Pansy can't make me stop being friends with you. Frankly, she's a twat, and I couldn't give less of a shit what she has to say about anything," he said, and he really only had time to regret the words—because they were stupid and inane and just…touchy-feely—because it took a few seconds for Luna to sort through them and smile. He found it difficult to regret things when she smiled, and shit, he was turning into a sap. Next he'd be making peace with Potter and feeding homeless Muggle children in his free time.

"Well, then don't try to force me away by being angry," she said through her smile, tilting her head at them in that way she had. "You know very well that it never makes me leave anyway, so you may as well save the energy. Do you want food? I was on my way to the kitchens."

Ignoring most of her words, Draco snorted and brushed past her, glad to put some space between them after those few heavy moments of standing a few centimeters apart.

"What is it with you and food?" he sneered over his shoulder, noticing the way her shoulders relaxed. He hadn't noticed when they'd tensed in the first place.

"My mother always said that food was like an edible hearth," she said, as though that explained everything.

"What?" he asked, proving that really, it didn't explain anything at all.

"Comfort," she said over her shoulder, having nearly reached the bottom of the staircase. He didn't remember her getting in front of him, but he hurried after just as she murmured, "I hope they have pudding."


	8. Chapter 8

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Harry Potter.

**a/n:** Okay, okay, I'm back with a new chapter! I'm so sorry for the wait—my muse for this story is really obnoxiously flighty. Have I mentioned that I've never managed to keep a story going for more than three chapters before? Because I haven't. The fact that this has reached eight chapters is truly phenomenal, and the fact that I have many more planned is even phenomenal-er. To make up for my tardiness, I wrote a cavity-inducing scene for you. I hated every second of it, but it's awesome. Anyway, I apologize if this one sucks—since it's been going for so long, I feel like my voices for Luna and Draco weren't as spot-on as usual. Forgive any out-of-character-ness you might notice. I promise they're still in here! Also, thank you all for the pile of reviews. I love all of you, and I try to reply to things, but now FFN doesn't have the reply system anymore, it's just PMs, so I feel a little weird replying to reviews like that. I'll reply when I can, though! Here's your chapter~

Oh! I lied! No chapter for you yet—I made a mistaaake with this story, completely forgetting about the whole…Draco confiding in Moaning Myrtle thing. It's been a while since I read the sixth book, so I didn't remember until I got to the one scene, and then I was like "OSHIT". So I'm going to go out on a limb here and…drop Luna into that part completely and totally, and yes, I'm pretty much editing Jo's original text, but let it be known that I'm doing it because I'm lazy and I acknowledge that I'm a horrible person for doing it. So. On with the show!

* * *

"What did you mean earlier, with the food and hearths?" he asked, watching as she paused in eating to blink at him.

There were house elves scuttling around, carrying dishes and various things from one place to the other, groups of them disappearing and reappearing every few minutes as they went on cleaning rounds in the castle. Draco hadn't ever liked the kitchens very much—the house elves always seemed so vile to contend with, and he hated the way their voices sounded. He found he didn't mind the elves so much, though, when Luna was there to diffuse the tension.

Luna looked at him for a long moment. When she blinked, her eyes flickered down to the bowl of pudding on the table between them. She licked her spoon thoughtfully, Draco absolutely refusing to pay attention to that action, before saying, "It was something my mother used to say. 'Food is a hearth at home in the matter of comfort.'"

She lapsed into silence, and he watched her, interested in the way she had tangled one hand in her hair, running fingers through her curls in a sort of rhythm as she peered thoughtfully at the table. It occurred to him that kissing her would be very nice, but that was ridiculous.

"I didn't like food very much," she said, voice quieter.

"How odd. You're obsessed with it now," he replied, arching an eyebrow. She smiled a little sadly and lifted her eyes to look at him.

"I'm not, really. You just looked like you needed comforting."

And that explained a lot, really. He had already figured out that the food was what had made him alright with talking to her when she first instigated their weird relationship. He had needed it, after all, and he was an inherently selfish being. Sustenance was offered, and though she was still the last person he wanted to talk to about his…mission, at the moment she had been the best person for the job. She wasn't threatening in any real way, and once he had gotten used to her, her presence really had become a comfort. Among other things.

The silence that fell took over, and she returned to her pudding happily. One of the elves appeared at her elbow to refresh her tea, but neither of them seemed to notice. Luna was distracted by a thought in her head and the curve of the light in her spoon, and Draco seemed to have forgotten that staring at her openly was a bad idea.

It was while he was studying her, the way her lips parted as she twirled the spoon between her fingers, the smooth skin of her neck, that he noticed a darker patch of skin on her left hand, one he had always known was there but had chosen not to pay attention to until he realized exactly what it was.

"Bloody hell," he said, paling as he reached for her hand, pulling it towards him across the table as he traced a finger over the scar Professor Umbridge had left in her skin. He had thought the writing would fade with time—seeing it still etched into the back of her hand, "I will not break rules," filled him with a kind of rage he'd come to associate with his father's growing cruelty to Draco's mother. He supposed it was something to do with protectiveness.

Luna blinked, her cheeks going pink at first until she realized what he was looking at. Her eyes hardened, though she tried to hide it under a sad smile.

"I had hoped it would heal by now," she said quietly. He looked up at her, frowning. Her tone of voice was odd to him, something off in it. It bothered him that he couldn't place it.

"Foul woman," he muttered, dropping his eyes back to her hand and the scar there.

"It's passed, Draco," said Luna, squeezing his hand gently.

"I helped make it happen, though," he said without meaning to, eyes squeezing shut when he realized he had spoken aloud.

"I don't blame you."

"How can you not blame me? I was horrible."

"You still are, Draco," she said, making him look up with something like hurt on his face. It dropped into befuddlement when he realized she was laughing at him somewhere in her head. "You just have trouble knowing how to make moral decisions. Anyone with parents like yours would have that problem. But don't worry, people can learn, especially you."

She stood then, dragging him with her by the hand still held between them. Thanking the elves for the food, she led him to the door, and they wandered into the corridor beyond. Draco only thought to drop her hand when they'd rounded the next corner and he realized they were walking rather closer than would be normal.

"Sorry," he muttered stupidly, resolutely avoiding looking in her direction.

She didn't share the same compulsion, turning her head to study his profile and the flush turning his cheeks and ears pink. Something clicked into place in her mind, a link between the way he'd been looking at her since last Wednesday and the amount of blushing he'd been doing in the same space of time.

She slowed to a stop, peering at him with her head tilted to one side. Draco noticed and stopped a few steps past her, turning to look at the blonde just as she opened her mouth to say something and a fresh set of footsteps made itself known.

Interrupting Luna's thought—which had been very important indeed—Padma Patil rounded the corner, looking intent and rather harassed.

"Oh hello, Padma—" Luna started, managing not to look put-out that such a moment had been put on hold.

"Merlin, there you are," Padma interrupted, scowling and grabbing Luna by the arm, dragging her away from Draco with a rather vitriolic glare in the Slytherin's direction.

"Were you looking for me?" Luna asked, blinking at her fellow Ravenclaw as they trotted along, moving rather faster than Luna would've had she any choice in the matter.

"For a bloody hour," was the reply. Luna considered this for a long moment before asking the obvious question.

"Why?"

Padma sighed.

"Because Ginny Weasley told Harry, Ron, and Hermione that she heard Justin Finch-Fletchley in the library telling Hannah Abbott that he heard Theodore Nott telling Crabbe and Goyle that Zabini had found out from a first year that Malfoy was tutoring you, and the four of them—"

"There were several names in that list. Which four do you mean?"

"Ginny, Harry, Ron, and Hermione." Padma shot her a glare. "Anyway, the four of them got pissed and went looking for you, and then they saw Parvati and asked Parvati to ask me to check the Ravenclaw common room, and I got dragged into their search party when you weren't there."

"Oh," Luna said, feeling very well-informed indeed.

* * *

"Luna! Please stop being stupid," Ginny said, rubbing her forehead in aggravation.

"I'm a Ravenclaw," Luna riposted, "I'm never stupid."

It was the most straightforward thing she'd said in the last twenty minutes.

"Look, just…just tell us why. Please?" Ginny prompted, leaning towards the blonde with an earnest expression on her face.

Hermione rolled her eyes in what she thought was a covert fashion.

"She's not going to say anything, Ginny. I think that's become obvious," she said bluntly, glancing at Luna as she patted the redhead's shoulder. "We all know how stubborn Luna can be."

Harry sighed along with Ginny, agreeing with Hermione silently. They'd been trying to get the Ravenclaw to tell them what could possibly compel her to get help from Malfoy of all people for far too long. At this point, it looked like an exercise in futility.

"Yeah, Ginny, let's let it go," he said, making a face. "She has her reasons."

"Why can't she tell them to us then?" Ginny asked, rounding on Harry. "It makes no bloody sense! She's our friend! She could just as easily asked Hermione, or me, or—"

"She's already asked me a few times, Ginny," Hermione interjected. "I admit, I don't know how to address her learning style."

The conversation devolved into pointless grumbling on Ginny's part, the other two trying to get her to stop wasting everyone's time. Ron, meanwhile, had fallen asleep slumped over a desk, and was snoring softly.

Luna didn't seem to mind the argument going on as if she weren't there, the three of them bickering—or, rather, Ginny trying to bicker while Harry and Hermione provided exasperated logic—while she gazed out the dark window at the moon.

She did have her reasons, she supposed, both for allowing Draco to help her and for not explaining herself to her friends. If she were to elucidate the latter reasoning, it would be something along the lines of seeing no reason to justify herself to a group of people who refused to give people second chances under ordinary circumstances. She knew, objectively, that no matter how hard she tried to get them to understand, they would keep their defenses raised against her words and experiences. If they were going to give Draco a chance, it would be because he did something to show them he deserved one, and Luna couldn't help him with that just yet. Plus, if she started talking about him, Ginny or Hermione would no doubt notice something about the way she said his name or a certain smile that would alert them to her mildly confusing but altogether superbly affectionate feelings for him, and that wouldn't do anyone any good. Ginny might have a heart attack, and Hermione would either ask questions until the world ended—not that Luna disliked questions in general, she just wasn't fond of these sorts of questions—or she would sputter incoherently and refuse to associate with Luna any further. She didn't want to risk any of it. And thus, her silence.

Things dragged on for a few more minutes, Luna sitting quietly until Ron started awake after some distressed muttering about his stuffed bear. Harry and Hermione had shared a glance at that and both bit back laughs, Hermione patting Ron's knee kindly. He scowled at her before looking around the room.

"What're we still doing here?" he asked, staring at Luna momentarily.

"Ginny is refusing to allow Luna her privacy," Hermione said, amusement in her tone, making the redhead in question glare and storm from the room.

"Oh," Ron said, considering this before turning back to squint at Luna. "You don't want to tell us about this Malfoy thing?"

"Not particularly," Luna said, looking at him with her normal mild expression in place.

"Well, to hell with this," he said, shifting out of his seat. "I'm going to bed. Just…I dunno, don't get yourself murdered or anything. Malfoy's an evil prat, remember?"

"Yes, I remember," she said, smiling at him as Harry and Hermione stood as well.

The three of them bid her goodnight, leaving the unused classroom they had inhabited soon after. Luna trailed after them, eyes on the ceiling as she turned towards the Ravenclaw common room. Bed did rather sound like a good idea. She did do some of her best thinking while sleeping, after all, and she had quite a bit to think about after tonight.

* * *

The next morning, Luna awoke feeling quite proud of herself. She had always rather liked herself, but she had always wondered if anyone else did. Now she had an answer to that quiet but bothersome question, and there was more than a little self-satisfaction involved in getting an affirmative to such a query. She supposed it would be better if Draco admitted it out loud, but for the moment, she was quite happy with things.

She drifted down to breakfast, her hair in a ponytail and one of her mother's bracelets around her wrist because she felt pretty, and doing pretty things when she felt pretty was always nice. No one seemed to notice the change in her spirits, which was a little sad, but predictable. She did such a flawless job of not showing her daily discomfort that a humming and buoyant Luna was hardly new to the students surrounding her.

She pulled a book out when she sat down at the Ravenclaw table, sliding a few pieces of bacon and some toast onto her plate as she opened it to the bookmark, picking up where she had left off the day before. Consequently, she wasn't paying attention when the post arrived, and didn't notice the owl land in front of her until it stepped onto the page she was about to turn, causing a tense moment in which she thought she had torn the page.

"Oh, hello," she said when she had ascertained that she wasn't about to die a slow, painful death at the hands of Madam Pince or her own sense of horror. The owl hooted at her and lifted its leg, to which was tied a small parcel.

Luna blinked, wondering who had sent it. She had only ever gotten packages from her father, and this barn owl had nothing to do with Xenophilus' tawny owl.

Relieving the owl of the package, she passed through various possibilities, not finding any of them likely.

"Thank you," she said, breaking off a bit of bacon and offering it to the bird with a smile. It hooted again, taking the food and flapping away, knocking her pumpkin juice over. She snatched the small parcel out of the way of the juice, studying it as she pulled her wand from behind her ear, cleaning the spill with a murmured "_Scougify!_" Whatever was inside was wrapped in parchment, sealed rather messily. Curiouser and curiouser.

Luna opened it, pulling a tangle of silver chain out of the parchment. It was completely knotted, with a tiny charm—two leaves of differing metals, one a delicate pink, the other a soft green, holding a small pearl in place—hanging from it.

"Oh," she said softly, holding it to the light. It was barely the size of a fly, and very pretty.

She glanced back to the parchment, searching for a note or a clue to who it was from. On one of the inside folds, she found a few scribbles of ink, and smiled.

_If you can untangle it, it's yours._

It was Draco's handwriting.

* * *

For the life of him, he couldn't figure out why he had done it, except that the look on her face made him happier than he'd been in months, and much more genuinely so. It wasn't like he'd been using it, anyway—the damn thing had been cluttering the drawer in his bedside table since the end of last year. His mother had given it to him on the pretense of him giving it to Pansy, but he had taken one looked at it and known she would hate it. It was too small, too delicate for her ostentatious fashion sense, and he had never seen her wear silver. Pansy never accepted anything but the most expensive gold, not that he'd ever tried to give her jewelry. And thus, it had drifted around in his trunk, and then in the drawer, for far too long, until he found it last night and immediately thought of Luna.

_At least I didn't sign my name_, he thought, watching her fiddle with the tangled mess of chain in what he hoped was a covert manner. Everyone knew he was tutoring her by now, which had ruined any reputation he had hoped to maintain—it would only be made worse if he was caught staring at her.

Of course, several seconds later, it occurred to him that Luna likely knew what his handwriting looked like by now, so anonymity was nigh on impossible. He squeezed his eyes shut, loosing a breath tiredly. He was out of luck—she would know, she would say something, he would have to explain himself. All of it was endlessly humiliating, and he couldn't help but wonder why people prattled on about romance being a wonderful thing. Frankly, his life had been so much easier before he had figured out how his feelings worked and that it was possible to actually like girls beyond sex, and here was Luna, scrambling his head up with her stupid mental circles and her beautiful mouth.

* * *

Though, of course, things couldn't keep going as well as they had been. He spent lunch in the Room of Requirement, banging his head—metaphorically—against his hugest problem, and making no progress, as per usual. He left just in time for class, and forced himself back into the room before dinner, his head throbbing. He was getting desperate, and though he had been getting better sleep recently, though he had been eating more and beating himself up less about it, the sky was still falling when he left the cluttered room an hour later. He was no stranger to panic at this point in the game, so he knew why he felt like he couldn't breathe, why the world was quivering just slightly, why the floor under his feet felt far too solid to be comforting, because his knees were jelly above them. He was terrified, though, as he pressed himself against the wall behind him, eyes on the ceiling, trying to make the corridor stop its spinning.

He heard footsteps—_her_ footsteps—and his panic increased, a shout of _Can't let her see me like this, run, run _starting up in his head. Just as she rounded the corner, he sped past her, eyes wide as he aimed for anywhere but there, anywhere deserted.

"Draco?" she called after him, sounding confused and less airy than he had heard her yet. He could hear her following him, feet pounding a few corners behind. He kept running, half-hoping the exertion would make his breathing even out as a survival instinct, but no such luck. He reached the end of his speed two floors down, and had to stop to lean against the wall just outside the girls' bathroom. He heard Luna running down the next corridor, and bit back a groan, slipping into Moaning Myrtle's domain grudgingly, but with a sense of necessity as he struggled for breath and tried to keep standing.

The door had made a noise, though, and Luna was smart. She opened the door several moments later, her cheeks flushed and breathing shallow.

"Draco," she said, closing the door and looking at him with wide eyes, chest heaving.

"Oh god," he groaned, feeling tears pricking his eyes. He turned away, moved as far away from her as he could. He was shaking and disheveled, and the sight of him so shaken apart scared Luna more than a great many things. She knew the situation he was in, although vaguely, but she had never thought to see him showing his panic. Even with his back to her, she could hear his crying in the way his already strained breaths tightened on sobs he refused to release. His hands were clenched so tightly around the rim of the sink he was leaning on that she half-thought he would shatter the porcelain.

"Tell me," she said softly, trying to hide the fear churning in her stomach as she moved toward the sinks, circling to the far side to try to see his face. "I can help."

He broke, choking on a breath. He started speaking slowly, eyes shut against his panic and the hope that was always in her face. "No one can help me. I can't do it…I can't…It won't work…and unless I do it soon…he says he'll kill me…."

Luna let out a breath, pressing a hand to her eyes to keep from crying herself. Other people's desperation had always hurt her more than her own, and Draco was just so…

She didn't finish the train of thought, because Draco spun away for some reason, drawing his wand and sending a hex towards the door. Luna flinched, moving to see Harry dodging splinters of glass as Draco's hex hit a lamp. Harry sent a jinx—a silent one—Draco's way, and it was blocked, but Luna just couldn't—

"Stop it! Harry, Draco, no! _Stop!_" she cried, taking a step forward only to freeze when she heard the beginning of a spell she never wanted anywhere near her fall from Draco's lips moments after a cistern, hit by another silent spell from Harry, exploded behind her. Harry cut him off, and then there was blood, and Luna had almost nearly never been as scared as she was when she registered Draco and Harry both on the floor, Harry gasping out "No—" and clambering to his feet, Draco shaking and bleeding.

She was crying, but she didn't notice, standing with her entire body frozen, mouth open—with what words, she didn't know.

Moaning Mytle, having watched excitedly from an open stall, started screaming within seconds, "MURDER! MURDER IN THE BATHROOM! MURDER!", and then Professor Snape was there, and Luna had a memory of stepping into her mother's workroom after the accident, the blood and the smell and what had been her mother seconds ago—she ran out, slipping on the wet floor, and wobbled to a halt in the corridor.

Sickness bubbled in her stomach, and she fell the floor gracelessly, eyes on her shoes, hands limp.

* * *

She didn't remember much of it when she woke up later, eyes meeting the ceiling of the hospital wing with vague familiarity. She had only been in here a handful of times over the years, only twice for herself.

"Oh, good, you're awake."

Luna turned her head to see Madam Pomfrey bustling towards her with a tray of food. She wasn't quite hungry, but it was a good thing to have at a time like this, food. Have the smell of it in her nose when she asked what had happened.

"He'll be fine," Madam Pomfrey said, waving her hand to make the supine blonde sit up.

Luna accepted the elder witch's words and the food silently, glancing around the room as she shredded bread between her fingers, eating it slowly. She saw Draco a few beds down on the other side of the room, his chest rising and falling evenly. Relief flooded her, which confused her for a moment. Madam Pomfrey had assured her that he was alright—why should Luna be relieved to have proof? She trusted authority figures, much though her father would have her question every single one of them.

"It's worse than I thought," she murmured, reaching up to touch the necklace around her neck, her finger brushing the little pearl clasped between leaves.

* * *

He woke up feeling horrid the next morning, which wasn't anything new, except that there were concrete reasons for the horridness now. For starters, the places that Potter's spell had mauled him still stung, though they had healed to the point of minute scarring by then; the dittany had done horrible things to his stomach; and the sunlight streaming in through the east windows of the hospital wing was giving him the worst kind of headache.

Someone shifted in his periphery, and he turned his head just as Luna turned to look down at him, having gotten distracted from her evident window-gazing by the sound of his shifting.

She smiled at him, one of her quiet, sincere things.

"Good morning," she said, voice soft as she moved to sit in the chair next to his bed. She looked tired, he realized, dark circles under her eyes even though she looked as placid as ever. Well, no, that wasn't true—he could find concern in the way she was looking at him, the way she tilted her head.

"Why are you here?" he asked, clearing his throat just after, his voice having come out gruff and sleep-filled.

Her smile faded, face slipping back into its typical, difficult-to-read look of vague interest.

"Why wouldn't I be here?" she asked after a silence on the long side, blinking at him.

He paused, eyeing her carefully before looking away and saying, "You usually side with Potter on these things."

He heard her sigh and looked back at her, taking in the downcast eyes and the twist of her mouth.

"I don't know who's right, at the moment," she said quietly, laying a hand on top of his and curling her fingers against his palm. "I just know that he hurt you more than you hurt him."

He snorted.

"That's an understatement."

He shifted his hand around to squeeze hers, though, managing to ignore the rising heat in his cheeks as he did so.

"Thank you for the necklace," she said, touching it with her free hand. Her cheeks were pink, as well, which made his heart do something ridiculous in his chest. He almost wished he'd lost more blood so it couldn't act the fool like that.

"Better than letting it lie around and tarnish," he muttered, eyes skating away.

Silence fell for a long moment, Luna eyeing him, glancing at their twined hands, and looking up at the clock on the far wall.

Draco tensed when he felt her hair brush his face—and her lips brush his cheek.

"Really," she said, face still closer to his than was natural. "Thank you, Draco."

She drew her hand away and turned to go, settling her schoolbag on her shoulder as she went.

"You're welcome," he murmured after her, not quite sure if she heard him or not as the door swung shut behind her.


End file.
